“I wish I had one dollar in my pocket for every blond hat with red hair her Felix had before he married.”

“But it’s the second time this week I hear it, Mosher.  The same description of such a—­a nix in a red hat.  Once in a cabaret show Gussie says she heard it from a neighbor, and now in and out from taxicabs with her.  Four times this week he’s not been home, Mosher.  I can’t help it, I—­I get crazy with worry.”

A sudden, almost a simian old-age seemed to roll, like a cloud that can thunder, across Sara’s face.  She was suddenly very small and no little old.  Veins came out on her brow and upon the backs of her hands, and Mosher, depressed with an unconscious awareness, was looking into the tired, cold, watery eyes of the fleet woman who had been his.

“Why, Sara!” he said, and came around the table to let her head wilt in unwonted fashion against his coat.  “Mamma!”

“I’m tired, Mosher.”  She said her words almost like a gush of warm blood from the wound of her mouth.  “I’m tired from keeping up and holding in.  I have felt so sure for these last four years that we have saved him from his—­his wildness—­and now, to begin all over again, I—­I ’ain’t got the fight left in me, Mosher.”

“You don’t have to have any fight in you, Mamma.  ’Ain’t you got a husband and a son to fight for you?”

“Sometimes I think, except for the piece of my heart I left lying back there, that there are worse agonies than even massacres.  I’ve struggled so that he should be good and great, Mosher, and now, after four years already thinking I’ve won—­maybe, after all, I haven’t.”

“Why, Sara!  Why, Mamma!  Shame!  I never saw you like this before.  You ain’t getting sick for another trip to the Catskills, are you?  Maybe you need some baths—­”

“Sulphur water don’t cure heart sickness.”

“Heart sickness, nonsense!  You know I don’t always take sides with Nicky, Mamma.  I don’t say he hasn’t been a hard boy to raise.  But a man, Mamma, is a man!  I wouldn’t think much of him if he wasn’t.  You ’ain’t got him to your apron string in short pants any more.  Whatever troubles we’ve had with him, women haven’t been one of them.  Shame, Mamma, the first time your grown-up son of a man cuts up maybe a little nonsense with the girls!  Shame!”

“Girls!  No one would want more than me he should settle himself down to a fine, self-respecting citizen with a fine, sweet girl like Ad—­”

“Believe me, and I ain’t ashamed to say it, I wasn’t an angel, neither, every minute before I was married.”

“My husband brags to me about his indiscretioncies.”

“Na, na, Mamma, right away when I open my mouth you make out a case against me.  I only say it to show you how a mother maybe don’t understand as well as a father how natural a few wild oats can be.”

“L-Leo didn’t have ’em.”

“Leo ain’t a genius.  He’s just a good boy.”