Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole — John Shaqi
Just Around the Corner: Romance en casseroleHurst, Fannie
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Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole
Hurst, Fannie
New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Short stories
"Anybody's too good for a girl that ain't got no order! I wonder what
Marcus Gump would say if he knew how you treat your things? Her good
pink dress that I paid twenty dollars for the making alone she throws
round like it cost nothing! Sack-cloth is too good! I don't put it
away--you can wait on yourself."
However, as she spoke Mrs. Katzenstein folded the pink gown, with an
avalanche of lace flowing from the bodice, lengthwise in a drawer and
smothered it with tissue-paper.
"That a girl like that shouldn't be ashamed to let her poor old mother
wait on her!"
"I'd put it away, mamma, if you'd just give me time."
"Tuesday, when I have the ladies and my card party, she sleeps! No
consideration that girl has got for her mother!"
Birdie swung herself to the side of the bed; her wealth of crow-blue
hair fell over her shoulders; sleep trembled on her lashes.
"I'm up, ain't I? Now are you satisfied?"
"For all the help you are to me you might as well stay in bed the rest
of the morning. A girl that can come home from a party and have nothing
to say! But for my part I don't want to know. I guess they had a big
blow-out, didn't they?"
Birdie, high-chested as Juno, with wide, firm shoulders that sloped as
must have sloped the shoulders of Artemis when they tempted Actaeon,
coiled her hair before the mirror with the gesture that has belonged to
women since first they coiled their hair. Her cheeks, fleshly but
fruit-like in their freshness, might have belonged to a buxom nymph of
the grove.
"I wish you could have seen the spread Jeanette had, mamma! I brought
home the recipe for her lobster chops. I'll bet if she had one she had
six different kinds of ice-cream."
With one swoop Mrs. Katzenstein flung the snowy avalanche of pillows and
sheets over the footboard of the bed and opened wide both the windows.
"Tillie," she cried, "bring me the broom. I'll start in Miss Birdie's
room while you finish the breakfast dishes."
"Such an affair as she had! I said to Marcus, on the way home, it could
have been at Delmonico's and not have been finer."
"You don't say so! Such is life, ain't it? We knew Simon Lefkowitz when
he used to come to papa and buy for his stock six shirt-waists at a
time. Then they didn't live in no eighty-dollar apartment. Many's the
morning I used to meet the old lady at market. Who else was there?"
"Who? Let me see! Gertie Glauber was there. She had on that dress
Laevitt made; and, believe me, I liked mine better. Tekla Stein and
Morris Adler--you know those Adlers in the millinery business?"
"Nice people!"
"You couldn't get a pin between Tekla and him--honest, how that girl
worked for him! Selma Blumenthal was there, too, and I must say she
looked grand--those eyes of hers and that figure! But what those fellows
can see in her so much I don't know. Honest, mamma, she's such a
dumbhead she can't talk ten words to a boy."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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