"I didn't look at you like a pickpocket, Ralph," Morris said. "What did your Uncle Max ring you up for?" "Why, he wanted me to tell you that so long as you was so kind and gives me this here vacation job I should do you a good turn, too. He says that Miss Atkinson tells him yesterday she was going out oitermobile riding with you, and so he says I should tell you not to go to any expense by Miss Atkinson, on account that she already bought her fall line from Uncle Max when he was in Duluth three weeks ago already; and that she is now in New York strictly on her vacation only, and _not_ to buy goods." Morris nodded slowly. "Well, Ralph," he said, "you're a good, smart boy, and I want you to stay until Miss Cohen comes back and maybe we'll raise you a couple of dollars a week till then." He bit the end off a Heatherbloom Inn cigar. "When a man gets played it good for a sucker like we was," he mused, "a couple of dollars more or less won't harm him none." "That's what my Uncle Max says when he seen you up at the Heatherbloom Inn yesterday," Ralph commented. "_He_ seen me up at the Heatherbloom Inn!" Morris cried. "How should he seen me up at the Heatherbloom Inn? I thought he was made it arrested." "Sure he was made it arrested," Ralph said. "But he fixed it up all right at the station-house, and the sergeant lets him out. So he goes up to the Heatherbloom Inn because when he went right back to the hotel to see after that Miss Taylor the carriage agent tells him a feller chases him up in an oitermobile to the Heatherbloom Inn. But when Uncle Max gets up there you look like you was having such a good time already he hates to interrupt you, so he goes back to the store again." Morris puffed violently at his cigar. "That's a fine piece of work," he said, "that Max Tuchman is." Ralph nodded. "Sure he is," he replied. "Uncle Max is an up-to-date feller." CHAPTER XI "The trouble is with us, Mawruss," Abe Potash declared one afternoon in September, "that we ain't in an up-to-date neighborhood. We should get it a loft in one of them buildings up in Seventeenth, Eighteenth or Nineteenth Street, Mawruss. All the trade is up in that neighborhood." "I ain't got such a good head for figures like you got it, Abe," Morris Perlmutter replied, "and so I am content we should stay where we are. We done it always a fair business here, Abe. Ain't it?" "Sure, I know," Abe went on, "but the way it is with out-of-town buyers, Mawruss, they goes where the crowd is, and they ain't going to be bothered to come way downtown for us, Mawruss." "Well, how about Klinger & Klein, Lapidus & Elenbogen, and all them people, Abe?" Morris asked. "Ain't them out-of-town buyers going to buy goods off of them neither?" "Klinger & Klein already hire it a fine loft on Nineteenth Street," Abe interposed.