"Shame on you, Rosie! You want your daughter to grow up with a pants-cutter all her life for a father? You want I should die in somebody else's harness. Maybe I didn't hit it right away, but I say yet, if a fellow's got the eyes and the nerve to see ahead a little with his imagination--"

"'Imagination.' He talks like a story-book."

"Now--now, take Hahn, Rosie--there's a fellow's got imagination--but not enough. I know it makes you mad when I talk on his picture-machine, but you take it from me--there's a fellow with a good thing under his very nose, but he--he 'ain't quite got the eyes to see ahead."

"Say, for such a good thing like Emil Hahn's picture-machine, where his wife had to work in my own mother's sausage-store, I can't make myself excited."

"He 'ain't quite got the eyes to see, Rosie, the big idea in it. He's afraid of life, instead of making it so that life should be afraid of him. Ten dollars cheaper I can buy that machine to-day than last week. A song for it, I tell you."

"Ninety dollars to me is no cheap song, Roody."

"The people got to be amused the same as they got to be fed. A man will pay for his amusements quicker than he will pay his butcher's or his doctor's bill. It's a cash business, Rosie. All you do with such a machine like Hahn's is get it well placed, drop your penny in the slot, and see one picture after another as big as life. I remember back in the old country, the years before we came over, when I was yet a youngster--"

"You bet Hahn never put his good money in that machine. I got it from Birdie Hahn herself. For a bad debt he took it over along with two feather beds and--"

"One after another pictures as big as life, Rosie, like real people moving. One of them, I give you my word, it's grand! A woman it shows all wrapped tight around in white, on a sofa covered over with such a spotted--what you call--leopard-skin."

"To me that has a sound, Roody, not to be proud of--"

"A living picture, with such neck and arms and--"

"That's enough, Roody! That's enough! I'm ashamed even for your daughter here!"

"Such a machine, maybe some day two or three, set up in a place like Coney Island or, for a beginning, in Pleasure Arcade, is an immense idea, Rosie. Until an invention like this, nine-tenths of the people couldn't afford the theyater. The drop-picture machine takes care of them nine-tenths."

"Theyaters are no place for the poor."

"That's where you're wrong--they need it the most. I don't want to get you worked up, Rosie, while you ain't strong, but every day that we wait we're letting a great idea slip through our fingers. If I don't buy that machine off Emil Hahn, somebody else will see in it what I see. Then all our lives we will have something to reproach ourselves with."

Mrs. Pelz let slide her hand beneath the pillow, eyes closing and her face seeming to whiten.

"Ninety dollars! Twenty dollars less than every cent we got saved in the world. It ain't right we should gamble with it, Roody. Not now."

"Why not now, Rosie? It's all the more reason. Is it worth maybe a little gamble our Bleema should grow up like the best? I got bigger plans for her and her little mammela than such a back room all their lives. In a few years, maybe three rooms for ourselves in one of them newfangled apartment-houses up on Second Avenue with turn-on hot water--"

"That's right--you'll have her riding in a horseless carriage next!"

"I tell you, it's a big idea!"

"I wish we had ten cents for every big idea you've been struck with."

"That's just why, Rosie, I'm going to hit one right."

Mrs. Pelz withdrew then the slow hand from beneath the pillow and a small handkerchief with a small wad knotted into it.

"Nearly every--cent--in--the world, Roody, that we've got. Saved nearly penny by penny. Our Bleema--it's a sin--our--our--"

"Sin nothing!"

"Our week-old little girl--it--"

"Nothing ventured in life, Rosie, nothing squeezed out of it. Don't put it back! Look, the baby herself wants it! Papa's little Bleema! Look!

She's trying to lift herself. Ain't that remarkable, Rosie--look at that child lifting for that handkerchief!"

"Our little baby girl! If it was for ourselves alone, all right, maybe, take a chance--but for--"

Suddenly Mr. Pelz clapped his thigh. "I got it! I got it! Well let the little Bleema decide it for us. How's that? She should decide it for us if we take a gamble on her daddy's big idea! Here--I put a five-cents piece in her little hand and see which way she drops it. The little mammela will say which way it is to be--heads or tails. How's that, Rosie--the baby should decide it for us?"

"Roody--we mustn't!"

"Heads or tails, Rosie?"

"I--I--"

"Quick!"

"H-heads!"

"Quick now, papa's baby, open up little fist!"

"Roody, not so rough! She can't hold that big nickel."

"That's just what I want--she should let it fall."

"Roody, Roody, I hope it's tails."

The coin rolled to the bed-edge, bounced off to the floor, rolled to the zinc edge.

Immediately after, on all-fours, his face screwed up for scrutiny and the back of his neck hotly ridden with crimson, Mr. Pelz leaned after.

"Roody--what?"

"Heads!"

Where Riverside Drive reaches its rococo climax of the twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year and twelve-story-high apartment-house de luxe and duplex, and six baths divided by fourteen rooms is equal to solid-marble comfort, Elsinore Court, the neurotic Prince of Denmark and Controversy done in gilt mosaics all over the foyer, juts above the sky-line, and from the convex, rather pop-eyed windows of its top story, bulges high and wide of view over the city.

From one of these windows, looking north, Rudolph Pelz, by the holding-aside of a dead weight of pink brocade and filet lace, could gaze upon a sweep of Hudson River that flowed majestically between the great flank of the city and the brobdingnagian Palisades.

After a day when he had unerringly directed the great swinging crane of this or that gigantic transaction it had a laving effect upon him--this view of sure and fluent tide that ran so perpetually into infinitude.

Yet for Mr. Pelz to attempt to articulate into words this porcelain-thin pillar of emotions was to shatter it into brittle bits.

"Say, Rosie, ain't that a view for you? That's how it is with life--a river that rises with getting born and flows into death, and the in-between is life and--and--"

"Roody, will you please hurry for sup--dinner? Do you want Feist to arrive with you not yet dressed?"

Mr. Pelz turned then into an interior that was as pink and as silk as the inside of a bud--satin walls with side brackets softly simulating candles; a Canet bed, piled with a careful riot of sheerest and roundest of pillows; that long suit of the interior decorator, the _chaise-longue_; the four French engravings in their gilt frames; the latest original Josephine's _secretaire_; the shine of a white adjoining bathroom. Before a door-impaneled mirror, Mrs. Pelz, in a black-lace gown that was gracious to her rotundity.