There were fifteen recalls from the wings, Abrahm Kantor standing
counting them off on his fingers and trembling to receive the
Stradivarius. Then, finally, and against the frantic negative pantomime
of his manager, a scherzo, played so lacily that it swept the house in
lightest laughter.

When Leon Kantor finally completed his program they were loath to let
him go, crowding down the aisles upon him, applauding up, down, around
him until the great disheveled house was like the roaring of a sea, and
he would laugh and throw out his arm in widespread helplessness, and
always his manager in the background gesticulating against too much of
his precious product for the money, ushers already slamming up chairs,
his father's arms out for the Stradivarius, and, deepest in the gloom of
the wings, Sarah Kantor, in a rocker especially dragged out for her, and
from the depths of the black-silk reticule, darning his socks.

"Bravo--bravo! Give us the 'Humoresque'--Chopin Nocturne--Polonaise
--'Humoresque.' Bravo--bravo!"

And even as they stood, hatted and coated, importuning and pressing in
upon him, and with a wisp of a smile to the fourth left box, Leon Kantor
played them the "Humoresque" of Dvorak, skedaddling, plucking,
quirking--that laugh on life with a tear behind it. Then suddenly,
because he could escape no other way, rushed straight back for his
dressing-room, bursting in upon a flood of family already there: Isadore
Kantor, blue-shaved, aquiline, and already graying at the temples; his
five-year-old son, Leon; a soft little pouter-pigeon of a wife, too,
enormous of bust, in glittering ear-drops and a wrist watch of diamonds
half buried in chubby wrist; Miss Esther Kantor, pink and pretty;
Rudolph; Boris, not yet done with growing-pains.