Right away you fly to pieces.
I say again, you don't know how to handle your son. Promise me you won't
say nothing to him or let on, Mosher. Promise me."
"That's the way with you women. You get a man crazy and then--"
"I tell you it's just my nonsense."
"If I get mad you're mad, and if I don't get mad you're mad! Go do me
something to help me solve such a riddle like you."
"It's because me and his aunt Gussie are a pair of matchmaking old
women. That the two cousins should marry the two sisters, Irma and Ada,
we got it fixed between us! Just as if because we want it that way it's
got to happen that way!"
"A pair of geeses, the two of you!"
"I wouldn't let on to Gussie, but Ada, the single one, has got Leo's
Irma beat for looks. Such a complexion! And the way she comes over to
sew with me afternoons! A young girl like that! An old woman like me!
You see, Mosher? See?"
"See, she asks me. What good does it do me if I see or I don't see when
his mother gets her mind made up?"
"But does Nicky so much as look at her? That night at Leo's birthday I
was ashamed the way he right away had an engagement after supper, when
she sat next to him and all through the meal gave him the white meat off
her own plate.
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