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A silence, thoughtful, brooding. Then, from Mrs. Wormser: “What good do you have of your children? They grow up, and what do you have of them?”

More shaking of heads, and a dark murmur about the advisability of an Old People’s Home as a refuge. Then:

“My son Hugo said only yesterday, ‘Ma,’ he said, ‘when it comes to housekeeping you could teach them all something, believe me. Why,’ he says, ‘if I was to try and get a cup of coffee like this in a restaurant–well, you couldn’t get it in a restaurant, that’s all. You couldn’t get it in any hotel, Michigan Avenue or I don’t care where.'”

Goaded, Mrs. Lamb would look up from her knitting. “Mark my words, he’ll marry yet.” She was a sallow, lively woman, her hair still markedly streaked with black. Her rheumatism-twisted fingers were always grotesquely busy with some handiwork, and the finished product was a marvel of perfection.

Mrs. Wormser, plump, placid, agreed. “That’s the kind always marries late. And they get it the worst. Say, my son was no spring chicken, either, when he married. And you would think the sun rises and sets in his wife. Well, I suppose it’s only natural. But you wait.”

“Some girl is going to have a snap.” Mrs. Brunswick, eager, peering, a trifle vindictive, offered final opinion. “The girls aren’t going to let a boy like your Hugo get away. Not nowadays, the way they run after them like crazy. All they think about is dress and a good time.”

The three smiled grimly. Ma Mandle smiled, too, a little nervously, her fingers creasing and uncreasing a fold of her black silk skirt as she made airy answer: “If I’ve said once I’ve said a million times to my son Hugo, ‘Hugo, why don’t you pick out some nice girl and settle down? I won’t be here always.’ And he says, ‘Getting tired of me, are you, Ma? I guess maybe you’re looking for a younger fellow.’ Only last night I said, at the table, ‘Hugo, when are you going to get married?’ And he laughed. ‘When I find somebody that can cook dumplings like these. Pass me another, Ma’.”

“That’s all very well,” said Mrs. Wormser.

“But when the right one comes along he won’t know dumplings from mud.”

“Oh, a man of forty isn’t such a–“

“He’s just like a man of twenty-five–only worse.”

Mrs. Mandle would rise, abruptly. “Well, I guess you all know my son Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies?”

They would proceed solemnly and eagerly to the columned coolness of the park refectory where they would drink their thick, creamy coffee. They never knew, perhaps, how keenly they counted on that cup of coffee, or how hungrily they drank it. Their minds, unconsciously, were definitely fixed on the four-o’clock drink that stimulated the old nerves.

Life had not always been so plumply upholstered for old lady Mandle. She had known its sharp corners and cruel edges. At twenty-three, a strong, healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandle, a dour man twenty-two years her senior. In their twenty-five years of married life together Hattie Mandle never had had a five-cent piece that she could call her own. Her husband was reputed to be wealthy, and probably was, according to the standards of that day. There were three children: Etta, the oldest; a second child, a girl, who died; and Hugo. Her husband’s miserliness, and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving necessary to clothe and feed her two children would have crushed the spirit of many women. But hard and glum as her old husband was he never quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun. The habit of heart-breaking economy clung to her, however, even when days of plenty became hers. It showed in little hoarding ways: in the saving of burned matches, of bits of ribbon, of scraps of food, of the very furniture and linen, as though, when these were gone, no more would follow.