"But I'm not. I'm trying to be serious. And you're all scared. Old Lady Butler--'Madame Butler' she insists on it! I could die!--is almost eighty-six, and Sam's crowding fifty. He's a smart business man--splendid mind--a whole lot superior to mine; I know that. And yet when he's with her--which is most of his spare time--he's like a baby in her hands. She makes a slave of him. She hates any girl he looks at. She's as jealous as a maniac. She tells him all sorts of things about me. Lies. He has to go out of the house to telephone me. Once I called him up at the house and he had to have the doctor in for her. That's the way she works it; tells him that if she dies it will be on his head, or something Biblical like that. Imagine! In this day! And Sam pays every cent of the household expenses and dresses his mother like a duchess. Look at me and my mother. We're always going around to summer resorts together. Just two pals! M-m-m! 'Don't tell me you're the mother of a big girl like that! Why, you look like sisters!' Big girl--me! That ought to have five chil--not that I want 'em ... now. But whenever I see one of those young mothers with her old daughter on a summer resort veranda I want to go up to the tired old daughter and say, 'Listen, gal. Run away with the iceman, or join a circus, or take up bare-legged dancing--anything to express yourself before it's too late.'" They had frankly stopped their knitting now. The bride's lip was caught nervously between her teeth. Even thus her face still wore a crooked and uncertain smile--the smile of the harassed hostess whose party had taken an unmanageable turn for the worse. It was Amy Stattler who first took up her knitting again, her face serene. "How about those of us who are doing constructive work? I suppose we're failures too!" She straightened a white cuff primly. "I have my Work." "All right. Have it. But I notice that didn't keep you from wanting to marry that brainy little kike Socialist over on the West Side; and it didn't keep your people from interfering and influencing you, and making your life so miserable that you hadn't the spirit left to----" But Amy Stattler's face was so white and drawn and haggard--she was suddenly so old--that even Beck Schaefer's mad tongue ceased its cruel lashing for a moment; but only for a moment. Lottie Payson rolled her work into a neat bundle and jabbed a needle through it. She sat forward, her fine dark eyebrows gathered into a frown of pain and decent disapproval. "Beck, dear, you're causing a lot of needless discomfort. You're probably nervous to-day, or something----" "I'm nothing of the kind. Makes me furious to be told I'm nervous when I'm merely trying to present some interesting truths." "The truth isn't always helpful just because it hurts, you know."