The sly look of wiseacre wizened up Mosher’s face.

“Ada!” she says.  “The way you pronounce that girl’s name, Sara, it’s like every tooth in your mouth was diamond filled out of Berkowitz’s jewelry firm.”

Quite without precedent Sara’s lips began to quiver at this pleasantry.

“I’m worried, Mosher,” she said, putting down a forkful of untasted food that had journeyed twice toward her lips.  “I don’t say he—­Nicky—­I don’t say he should always stay home evenings when Ada comes over sometimes with Leo and Irma, but night after night—­three times whole nights—­I—­Mosher, I’m afraid.”

In his utter well-being from her warming food, Mosher drank deeply and, if it must be admitted, swishingly, through his mustache, inhaling copiously the draughts of Sara’s coffee.

Do not judge from the mustache cup with the gilt “Papa” inscribed, that Sara’s home did not meticulously reflect the newer McKinley period, so to speak, of the cut-glass-china closet, curio cabinet, brass bedstead, velour upholstery, and the marbelette Psyche.

They had furnished newly three years before, the year the business almost doubled, Sara and Gussie simultaneously, the two of them poring with bibliophiles’ fervor over Grand Rapids catalogic literature.

Bravely had Sara, even more so than Gussie, sacrificed her old regime to the dealer.  Only a samovar remained.  A red-and-white pressed-glass punch bowl, purchased out of Nicholas’s—­aged fourteen—­pig-bank savings.  An enlarged crayon of her twins from a baby picture.  A patent rocker which she kept in the kitchen. (It fitted her so for the attitude of peeling.) Two bisque plaques, with embossed angels.  Another chair capable of metamorphosis into a ladder.  And Mosher’s cup.

From this Mosher drank with gusto.  His mustache, to Sara so thrillingly American, without its complement of beard, could flare so above the relishing sounds of drinking.  It flared now and Mosher would share none of her concern.

“You got two talents, Sara.  First, for being my wife; and second, for wasting worry like it don’t cost you nothing in health or trips to Cold Springs in the Catskills for the baths.  Like it says in Nicky’s Shakespeare, a boy who don’t sow his wild oats when he’s young will some day do ’em under another name that don’t smell so sweet.”

“I—­It ain’t like I can talk over Nicky with you, Mosher, like another woman could with her husband.  Either you give him right or right away you get so mad you make it worse with him than better.”

“Now, Sara—­”

“But only this morning that Mrs. Lessauer I meet sometimes at Epstein’s fish store—­you know the rich sausage-casings Lessauers—­she says to me this morning, she says with her sweetness full of such a meanness, like it was knives in me—­’Me and my son and daughter-in-law was coming out of a movie last night and we saw your son getting into a taxicab with such a blonde in a red hat!’ The way she said it, Mosher, like a cat licking its whiskers—­’such a blonde in a red hat’!”