For the life of him, all he could find to convey to her the bleeding
quality of his sympathy was, "Poor, poor little woman!"

"Heigh-ho!" she said, and again, "Heigh-ho!"

There was quite a nape to her neck. He could see it where the carefully
trimmed brown hair left it for a rise to skillful coiffure, and what
threatened to be a slight depth of flesh across the shoulders had been
carefully massaged of this tendency, fifteen minutes each night and
morning, by her daughter.

In fact, through the black transparency of her waist Mr. Latz thought
her plumply adorable.

It was about the eyes that Mrs. Samstag showed most plainly whatever
inroads into her clay the years might have gained. There were little
dark areas beneath them like smeared charcoal, and two unrelenting sacs
that threatened to become pouchy.

Their effect was not so much one of years, but they gave Mrs. Samstag,
in spite of the only slightly plump and really passable figure, the look
of one out of health. Women of her kind of sallowness can be found daily
in fashionable physicians' outer offices, awaiting X-ray appointments.

What ailed Mrs. Samstag was hardly organic. She was the victim of
periodic and raging neuralgic fires that could sweep the right side of
her head and down into her shoulder blade with a great crackling and
blazing of nerves. It was not unusual for her daughter Alma to sit up
the one or two nights that it could endure, unfailing through the wee