Back STreet by Fannie Hurst

over, to have cast out the unease in his heart. The thought even smote him of trying to get Ray to elope with him to Covington. Right off. He had a chum, Tom Buzzel, and his wife, who would go along. Trouble with talking about a thing too much was talking too much about it. Two could live as cheaply as one. Always a way. The longer they hemmed and hawed, the more difficulties would present themselves. There was money ahead in this new partnership with the inventor of a device to attach a motor to an ordinary bicycle. Ray was not the girl to risk getting into lean times, dear darling, and yet on the other hand, she was the one girl with the stamina to buck them. Any way you looked at it, there was going to be disapproval over a marriage with Ray on the part of the stepaunt with whom he made his home. Dang it all, just fool woman-stuff. Never willing to let one another live.
    “Ray, if you only would?”
    “Would what?”
    “Your mind is a thousand miles away.”
    The Trauers kept tony hours. Seven-o’clock supper, and still at table, with the whole of the rest of Richmond Street already out on stoops. After all, the New York Friedlanders were among the world’s largest banking firms. She knew. She had looked them up. Aaron Trauer might be only in the life-insurance business, but he had these enormously wealthy connections of his wife to lend prestige. Catch a rich Jew like Felix-Arnold Friedlander seeing his sisteror his sister’s children want for anything. Plain as the nose on your face that a mere life-insurance agent could not unaided afford that house and the smart little horse and buggy in front of it. Chances were, the eastern connections would take a clean, bright young fellow like Walter into the New York banking house. For all she knew, that might be the secret of his position in the Cincinnati bank. Who knows? The sense of misery began to crawl around her heart again, and roost there.
    “Come, let’s go into the park, Ray. I can talk better there.”
    She lifted her skirts to cross the street, conscious that along the stoops heads were turning after her.
    “That’s that Ray Schmidt. Stylish, isn’t she? Those
batsimers
wear their clothes well. The boys don’t exactly come out and say she is n. g., but my guess is that she’s fast. That’s a pretty idea, isn’t it? Gored skirt with a Spanish flounce. They say she makes every stitch she wears over at Alvin Sewing School. Those shiksas have a knack.”
    It was pleasant to feel the heads turn after her dotted-swiss dress over its blue sateen slip and caught in at the waspish waist with a wide blue satin girdle from which depended a chatelaine of silver knickknacks. The big balloon elbow sleeves, with the black lace gloves tucked up under them, and the large leghorn hat with the wired bow, completed an ensemble that was an eyeful for Richmond Street. Couldn’t help knowing that. Despising yourself a bit for the knowing and the glowing that went with it, but glowing and knowing just the same.
    At Freeman Avenue the little park loomed softly in the dusk, pairs of figures strolling about beneath the trees along the ordered walks.
    They sat down on a bench, and she unpinned her hat and placed it carefully on her lap; and then Kurt, by way of preamble, took up one of her hands in its black lace glove and began to bend back the fingers softly, one by one.
    “This is the way I have figured it all out, Ray. The longer you wait to make up your mind, the more reasons you are going to find for not making it up. To my way of thinking, the way to reach animportant decision, in business or out of it, is not to think about a thing so long that you lose your point of view. Ever keep saying a word over and over to yourself until it lost its meaning? Well, that’s my experience on a decision. In business I think for all I’m worthwhile I’m thinking, and then I act! That’s the way I bought Ed Rokehauser’s patent in Peoria the other day. If I had stopped to turn that