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Exhausting the possibilities of gossip, and deciding not to go out to the theatre in spite of the news girl's exciting description of a play called "The New Sin" she was walking irresolutely through the high gilded and marble assemblage space when, unfortunately, she was captured by Mr. Moses Feldt.
Somehow she never actually came back. It wasn't only that, after so many years together, she occupied a room with another than Linda, but her manner was changed; it had lost all freedom of heart and speech. The new Mrs. Feldt was heavily polite to her husband's daughters; Linda saw that she liked Pansy, but Judith made her uncomfortable.
He led her to a high-backed lounge against the wall, where, seated on its extreme edge, he gazed silently at her with an expression of sentimental concern. Mr. Moses Feldt was a short round man, bald but for a fluffy rim of pale hair, and with the palest imaginable eyes in a countenance perpetually flushed by the physical necessity of accommodating his rotundity to awkward edges and conditions.
"You ought to know what to say to them," Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, "or I'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard a thing or two not easy forgotten." Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and she made a vain effort to explain her attitude. "Of course, it was horrid for you," she said. "I can understand how you'd never never forgive him.
Curiously, as Linda grew older, the consciousness of her stepfather as an absurd fat little man dwindled; she lost all sense of his actual person; and, as the influence of her mother slipped from her life, the mental conception of Mr. Moses Feldt deepened. She thought about him a great deal and very seriously; the things he said, the warm impact of his being, vibrated in her memory.
Condon, her sympathies engaged, was quite apt to leave on the table a five-dollar bill or an indiscriminate heap of silver. "You are a regular little Jew," she would reply lightly to Linda's protests. This, the latter thought, was unfair; for the only Jew she knew, Mr. Moses Feldt, an acquaintance of their present period in New York, was quite the most generous person she knew.
Moses Feldt, though he had never taken an actual part in it such bitterness was entirely outside his generous sentimentality had become acutely uncomfortable in his own home, imploring Linda, with ready tears, to be kinder to her mama. Judith, too, had grown cutting, jealous of Linda's serenity of youth, as her appearance showed the effect of her wasting emotions.
Moses Feldt, and I met Judith, who only existed for men and men's rooms and told me worse things, I'm sure, than mother ever dreamed; and, on top of that, I met you and you kissed me. "But it was different from any other; it didn't shock me, and it brought back a thrill I have always had. I wanted, then, to love you, and have you ask me to marry you, more than anything else in the world.
Moses Feldt Linda always thought of him as that was a miracle of kindly cheerfulness. He made his wife and her daughter, and his own girls, an unbroken succession of elaborate and costly presents. "What's it for if not to spend on those you love?" he would remark, bringing a small jeweler's box wrapped in creamy-pink paper from his pocket. "You can't take it with you.
"There really isn't much, besides hotels, all different; but you'd be surprised how alike they were, too. I mean the things to eat, and the people. I never realized how tired I was of them until mother married Mr. Moses Feldt. The children were simply dreadful, the children and the women; the men weren't much better." She said this in a tone of surprise, and he nodded.
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