"You're proposing--Louis!" She explained rather than asked, and placed her hand to her heart so prettily that he wanted to crush it there with his kisses. "God bless you for knowing it so easy, Carrie. A young girl would make it so hard. It's just what has kept me from asking you weeks ago, this getting it said. Carrie, will you?" "I'm a widow, Mr. Latz--Louis--" "Loo--" "L--Loo. With a grown daughter. Not one of those merry widows you read about." "That's me! A bachelor on top but a home-man underneath. Why, up to five years ago, Carrie, while the best little mother a man ever had was alive, I never had eyes for a woman or--" "It's common talk what a grand son you were to her, Mr. La--Louis--" "Loo!" "Loo." "I don't want to seem to brag, Carrie, but you saw the coat that just walked out on Mrs. Gronauer? My little mother, she was a humpback, Carrie, not a real one, but all stooped from the heavy years when she was helping my father to get his start. Well, anyway, that little stooped back was one of the reasons why I was so anxious to make it up to her. Y'understand?" "Yes--Loo." "But you saw that mink coat? Well, my little mother, three years before she died, was wearing one like that in sable. Real Russian. Set me back eighteen thousand, wholesale, and she never knew different than that it cost eighteen hundred. Proudest moment of my life when I helped my little old mother into her own automobile in that sable coat." "I had some friends lived in the Grenoble Apartments when you did--the Adelbergs. They used to tell me how it hung right down to her heels and she never got into the auto that she didn't pick it up so as not to sit on it." "That there coat is packed away in cold storage, now, Carrie, waiting, without me exactly knowing why, I guess, for--the one little woman in the world besides her I would let so much as touch its hem." Mrs. Samstag's lips parted, her teeth showing through like light. "Oh," she said, "sable. That's my fur, Loo. I've never owned any, but ask Alma if I don't stop to look at it in every show window. Sable!" "Carrie--would you--could you--I'm not what you would call a youngster in years, I guess, but forty-four ain't--" "I'm--forty-one, Louis. A man like you could have younger." "No. That's what I don't want. In my lonesomeness, after my mother's death, I thought once that maybe a young girl from the West, nice girl with her mother from Ohio--but I--funny thing, now I come to think about it--I never once mentioned my little mother's sable coat to her. I couldn't have satisfied a young girl like that or her me, Carrie, any more than I could satisfy Alma. It was one of those mama-made matches that we got into because we couldn't help it and out of it before it was too late. No, no, Carrie, what I want is a woman near to my own age."