“Mrs. Coblenz, see what I got for you!” She turned, smiling.  “You don’t look like you need salad and green ice-cream.  You look like you needed what I wanted—­a cup of coffee.”

“Aw, Mr. Haas—­now where in the world—­Aw, Mr. Haas!”

With a steaming cup outheld and carefully out of collision with the crowd, Mr. Haas unflapped a napkin with his free hand, inserting his foot in the rung of a chair and dragging it toward her.

“Now,” he cried, “sit and watch me take care of you!”

There comes a tide in the affairs of men when the years lap softly, leaving no particular inundations on the celebrated sands of time.  Between forty and fifty, that span of years which begin the first slight gradations from the apex of life, the gray hair, upstanding like a thick-bristled brush off Mr. Haas’s brow, had not so much as whitened, or the slight paunchiness enhanced even the moving-over of a button.  When Mr. Haas smiled, his mustache, which ended in a slight but not waxed flourish, lifted to reveal a white-and-gold smile of the artistry of careful dentistry, and when, upon occasion, he threw back his head to laugh, the roof of his mouth was his own.

He smiled now, peering through gold-rimmed spectacles attached by a chain to a wire-encircled left ear.

“Sit,” he cried, “and let me serve you!”

Standing there with a diffidence which she could not crowd down, Mrs. Coblenz smiled through closed lips that would pull at the corners.

“The idea, Mr. Haas—­going to all that trouble!”

“‘Trouble’! she says.  After two hours’ handshaking in a swallow-tail, a man knows what real trouble is!”

She stirred around and around the cup, supping up spoonfuls gratefully.

“I’m sure much obliged.  It touches the right spot.”

He pressed her down to the chair, seating himself on the low edge of the dais.

“Now you sit right there and rest your bones.”

“But my mother, Mr. Haas.  Before it’s time for the ride home she must rest in a quiet place.”

“My car’ll be here and waiting five minutes after I telephone.”

“You—­sure have been grand, Mr. Haas!”

“I shouldn’t be grand yet to my—­Let’s see—­what relation is it I am to you?”

“Honest, you’re a case, Mr. Haas—­always making fun!”

“My poor dead sister’s son marries your daughter.  That makes you my—­nothing-in-law.”

“Honest, Mr. Haas, if I was around you, I’d get fat laughing.”

“I wish you was.”

“Selene would have fits.  ‘Never get fat, mama,’ she says, ’if you don’t want—­’”

“I don’t mean that.”

“What?”

“I mean I wish you was around me.”

She struck him then with her fan, but the color rose up into the mound of her carefully piled hair.

“I always say I can see where Lester gets his comical ways.  Like his uncle, that boy keeps us all laughing.”