As near as it is possible for the eye to simulate the heart, there was
exactly that sentiment in his glance now as he found out Miss Bloom, she
in a purple-felt hat and the black scallops of escaping hair, blacker
because the red was out in her cheeks.
He broke into the kind of smile that lifted his every feature,
screw-lines at his eyes coming out, head bared, and his greeting
beginning to come even before she was within hearing distance of it.
There was in Mr. Lipkind precious little of Lothario, Launcelot,
Galahad, or any of that blankety-blank-verse coterie. There remains yet
unsung the lay of the five-foot-five, slightly bald, and ever so
slightly rotund lover. Falstaff and Romeo are the extremes of what Mr.
Lipkind was the not unhappy medium. Offhand in public places, men would
swap crop conditions and city politics with him. Twice, tired mothers in
railway stations had volunteered him their babies to dandle. Young
women, however, were not all impervious to him, and uncrossed their feet
and became consciously unconscious of him across street-car aisles. In
his very Two Dollar Hat Store, Sara Minniesinger, hooked of profile, but
who had impeccably kept his debits and credits for twelve years back
under the stock-balcony and a green eye-shade, was wont to cry of
evenings over and for him into her dingy pillow. He was so unconscious
of this that, on the twelfth anniversary of her incarceration beneath
the stock-balcony, he commissioned his mother to shop her a crown of
thorns in the form of a gold-handled umbrella with a bachelor-girl
flash-light attachment.
There are men like that, to whom life is not only a theosophy of one
God, but of one women who is sufficient thereof. When Samuel Lipkind
greeted Clara Bloom there was just that in his ardently
appraising glance.
"Didn't mean to keep you waiting, Clara--a last-minute customer. _You_
know."
"I've been counting red heads and wishing the Subway was pulled by white
horses."
"Say, Clara, but you look a picture! Believe me, Bettina, that is some
lid!"
Miss Bloom tucked up a rear strand of curl, turning her head to extreme
profile for his more complete approval.
"Is it an elegant trifle, Sam? I ask you is it an elegant trifle?"
"Clara, it's--immense! The best yet! What did it set you back?"
"Don't ask me! I'm afraid just saying it would give your mother
heart-failure by mental telepathy."
He linked her arm. "Whatever you paid, it's worth the money. It sets you
off like a gipsy queen."
"None of that, Sam! Mush is fattening."
"Mush nothing! It's the truth."
"Hurry. Schulem's got a new rule--no reserving the guest-table."
They let themselves be swept into the great surge of the underground
river with all of the rather thick-skinned unsensitiveness to
shoulder-to-shoulder contact which the Subway engenders. Swaying from
straps in a locked train, which tore like a shriek through a tube whose
sides sweated dampness, they talked in voices trained to compete
with the roar.
"What's the idea, Clara? When you telephoned yesterday I was afraid
maybe it was--Eddie Leonard cutting in on my night again."
"Eddie nothing. Is it a law, Sam, that I have to eat off your mother
every Wednesday night of my life?"
"No--only--you know how it is when you get used to things one way."
"I told you I had something to talk over, didn't I?"
They were rounding a curve now, so that they swayed face to face, nose
to nose.
A few crinkles, frequent with him of late, came out in rays from his
eyes.
"Is it anything you--you couldn't say in front of ma?"
"Yes."
He inserted two fingers into his collar, rearing back his head.
"Anything wrong, Clara?"
"You mean is anything right."
They rode in silence after that, both of them reading in three colors
the border effulgencies of frenzied advertising.
But when they emerged to a quieter up-town night that was already
pointed with a first star, he took her arm as they turned off into a
side-street that was architecturally a barracks to the eye, brownstone
front after brownstone front after brownstone front. Block after block
of New York's side-streets are sunk thus in brown study.
"You mustn't be so ready to be put out over every little thing I say,
Clara. Is it anything wrong to want you up at the house just as often as
we can get you?"
"No, Sam; it ain't that."
"Well then, what is it?"
"Oh, what's the use beginning all that again? I want to begin to-night
where we usually leave off."
"Is it--is it something we've talked about before, Clara?"
"Yes--and no. We've talked so much and so long without ever getting
anywheres--what's the difference whether we've ever talked it before
or not?"
"You just wait, Clara; everything is going to come out fine for us."
Her upper lip lifted slightly. "Yes," she said; "I've heard that
before."
"We're going to be mighty happy some day, just the same, and don't you
let yourself forget it. We've got good times ahead."
"Oh dear!" she sighed out.
"What?"
"Nothing."
He patted her arm. "You'll never know, Clara, the torture it's been for
me even your going out those few times with Eddie Leonard has put me
through. You're mine, Clara; a hundred Eddies couldn't change that."
"Who said anybody wanted to change it?"