"Sa-y, if you can't pay three-fifty, she'll make it three. You doan'
need to tell her I told you, but for such a young lady like you, sa-y,
the brice in the newspaper doan' always got to be the brice in the hand,
ain't it?"
She laughed, the irises that had crowded out the gray in her eyes
suddenly smaller and back to normal.
In the little entrance adjoining, with its line-up of door bells, she
pressed the button as directed. A clicking answered her ring, and she
had to learn from a child who entered with a dangling pail of milk, that
she was to speak upward through a tube above the bell.
"About the room?" Yes, she was to come up.
She climbed two flights of dark, clean-smelling stairs, and Mrs.
Neugass herself opened the door.
Mary, Rispah, Cornelia, Monica, Martha Washington, Mrs. Whistler,
Margaret Ogilvy, and Mrs. Neugass, blessed be their tribe, must all have
had about the same look about the eyes. Masha Neugass was sixty, and
looked it. A blue-gingham apron held her in at the waist so that she
bulged softly and fatly above and below it.
Thirty minutes and one hundred years removed from Millionaires' Row, the
apartment was just another of those paradoxes which the city can shake
from its spangled sleeve.
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