"
"Why, mommy, 'course not! Turn over now and go to sleep."
Another hour, and suddenly Mrs. Kaufman shot out her arm from the coverlet,
jerking back the sheet and feeling for her daughter's dewy, upturned face
where the tears were slashing down it.
"Baby!"
"Mommy, you--you mustn't!"
"Oh, my darling, like I didn't suspicion it!"
"It's only--"
"You got, Ruby, the meanest mama in the world. But you think, darling, I
got one minute's happiness like this?"
"I'm all right, mommy, only--"
"I been laying here half the night, Ruby, thinking how I'm a bad mother
what thinks only of her own--"
"No, no, mommy. Turn over and go to sl--"
"My daughter falls in love with a fine, upright young man like Leo
Markovitch, and I ain't satisfied yet! Suppose maybe for two or three years
you ain't so much on your feet. Suppose even his uncle Meyer don't take him
in. Don't any young man got to get his start slow?"
"Mommy!"
"Because I got for her my own ideas, my daughter shouldn't have in life the
man she wants!"
"But, mommy, if--"
"You think for one minute, Ruby, after all these years without this house
on my hands and my boarders and their kicks, a woman like me would be
satisfied? Why, the more, baby, I think of such a thing, the more I see it
for myself! What you think, Ruby, I do all day without steps to run, and
my gedinks with housekeeping and marketing after eighteen years of it? At
first, Ruby, ain't it natural it should come like a shock that you and that
rascal Leo got all of a sudden so--so thick? I--It ain't no more, baby.
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