Every Soul Hath Its Song. Fannie Hurst
"I tell you, ma, that kid's getting too fresh."
"You spoil her, Izzy, more as any one."
"It's those yellow novels, and that gang of drugstore snips you let her run with will be her ruination. If she was my kid I bet I'd have kept her in school another year."
"You shut up, Izzy Binswanger, and mind your own business. You never even went as long as me."
"With a boy it's different."
"You better lay pretty low, Izzy Binswanger, or I can tell a few tales. I guess I didn't see you the night after you got in from your last trip, in your white-flannel pants I pressed, dancing on the Brighton boat with that peroxide queen alrighty."
This time his face darkened with the blood of anger.
"You little imp, I'll—"
"Children! Stop it, do you hear! Ray, go right this minute and call Miriam and bring me my glasses. Izzy, do you think it's so nice that a grown man should tease his little sister?"
"I'll be glad when he goes out on his Western trip next week."
"Skidoo, you little imp!"
She tossed her head in high-spirited distemper and flounced through the doorway. He rose from his mound of pillows, jerking his daring waistcoat into place, flinging each knee outward to adjust the knifelike trouser creases, swept backward a black, pomaded forelock and straightened an accurate and vivid cravat.
"She's getting too fresh, I tell you, ma. If I catch her up round the White Front drug-store with that fresh crowd of kids I'll slap her face right there before them."
"Ach, at her age, Izzy, Miriam was just the same way, and now look how fine a boy has got to be before that girl will look at him. Too fine, I say!"
"Where's my hat, ma? I laid it here on the sewing-machine. Gee! the only way for a fellow to keep his hat round this joint is to sit on it!"
A quick frown sprang between Mrs. Binswanger's eyes and she glanced at her husband, hidden behind his barricade of newspaper. Her brow knotted and her wide, uncorseted figure half rose toward him.
"Izzy, one night can't you stay at home and—"
"I ain't gone yet, am I, ma? Don't holler before you're hurt. There's a fellow going to call for me at eight and we're going to a show—a good fellow for me to know, Irving Shapiro, city salesman for the Empire Waist Company. I ain't still in bibs, ma, that I got to be bossed where I go nights."
"Ach, Izzy, for why can't you stay home this evening? Stay home and you and Miriam and your friend sing songs together, and later I fix for you some sandwiches—not, Izzy? A young man like Irving Shapiro I bet likes it if you stay home with him once. Nice it will be for your sister, too—eh, Izzy?"
Mrs. Binswanger's face, slightly sagging at the mouth from the ravages of two recently extracted molars, broke into an invitational smile.
"Eh, Izzy?"
He found and withdrew his hat from behind a newspaper-rack and cast a quick glance toward the form of his father, whose nether half, ending in a pair of carpet slippers dangling free from his balbriggan heels, protruded from the barricade of newspaper.
"That's right, just get the old man started on me, ma, too. When a fellow travels six months out of the year in every two-by-four burg in the Middle West, nagging like this is just what he needs when he gets home."
"You know, Izzy, I'm the last one to start something."
"Then don't always ask a fellow where he's going, ma, and get pa started too."
"You know that not one thing that goes on does papa hear when he reads his paper, Izzy. Never one word do I say to him how I feel when you go, only I—I don't like you should run out nights so late, Izzy. Next week again already you go out on your trip and—"
"Now, ma, just—just you begin if you want to make me sore."
"I tell you, Izzy, I worry enough that you should be on the road so much. And ain't it natural, Izzy, when you ain't away I—I should like it that you stay by home a lot? Sit down, anyway, awhile yet till the Shapiro boy comes."
"Sure I will, ma."
"If I take a trip away from you this summer I worry, Izzy, and if I stay home I worry. Anyway I fix it I worry."
"Now, ma."
"Only sometimes I feel if your papa feels like he wants to spend the money—Well, anything is better as that girl should feel so bad that we don't take her to Europe."
He jingled a handful of loose coins from his pocket to his palm. "Cheer up, ma; if the old man will raise my salary I'll blow you to a wheelbarrow trip through Europe myself."
"'Sh-h-h-h, Izzy! Here comes Miriam. I don't want you should tease her one more word to make her mad. You hear?"
In the frame of the doorway, quiescent as an odalisque and with the golden tinge of a sunflower lighting her darkness, Miriam Binswanger held the picture for a moment, her brother greeting her with bow and banter.
"Well, little red-eyes!"
"Izzy, what did I just tell you!"
His sister flashed him a dark glance, reflexly her hand darting upward to her face. "You!"
"Now, now, children! Why don't you and Miriam go in the parlor, Izzy, and sing songs?"
"What you all so cooped up in here for, mamma? Open the window, Ray; it's as hot as summer outside."
"Say, who was your maid this time last year, Miriam?"
"Mamma, you going to let her talk that way to me?"
"Ray, will it hurt you to put up the window like your sister asks?"
"Well, I'm doing it, ain't I?"
"Now, Miriam, you and Izzy go in the parlor and sing for mamma a little."
Miriam's small teeth met in a small click, her voice lay under careful control and as if each nerve was twanging like a plucked violin string.
"Please, mamma, please! I just can't sing to-night!"
She was like a Jacque rose, dark and swaying, her little bosom beneath the sheer blouse rising higher than its wont.
"Please, mamma!"
"Ach, now, Miriam!"
"Where's those steamship pamphlets, mamma, I left laying here on the table?"
"Right here where you left them, Miriam."
Mr. Isadore Binswanger executed a two-stride dash for the couch, plunging into a nest of pillows and piling them high about his head and ears.
"Go-od night! The subject of Europe is again on the table for the seventh evening this week. Nix for mine! Good night! Good night!" And he fell to burrowing his head deeper among the pillows.
"You don't need to listen, Izzy Binswanger. I wasn't talking to you, anyways."
"No, to your mother you was talking—always to me. I got to hear it."
A sudden vibration darted through Mrs. Binswanger's body, straightening it. "Always me! I tell you, Simon, with your family you 'ain't got no troubles. I got 'em all. How he sits there behind his newspaper just like a boarder and not in the family! I tell you more as once in my life I have wished there was never a newspaper printed. Right under his nose he sits with one glued every evening."
"Na, na, old lady!"
"That sweet talk don't make no neverminds with me. 'Na, na,' he says. I tell you even when my children was babies how they could cry every night right under his nose and never a hand would that man raise to help me. I tell you my husband's a grand help to me. 'Such a grand husband,' the ladies always say to me I got. I wish they should know what I know!"
Mr.