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Latz and I sat and talked." An almost imperceptible nerve was dancing against Mrs. Samstag's right temple. Alma could sense, rather than see, the ridge of pain. "You're all right, mamma?" "Yes," said Mrs. Samstag, and sat down on a divan, its naked greenness relieved by a thrown scarf of black velvet stenciled in gold.
And instead of her eighteen she looked sixteen. There was that kind of timid adolescence about her, yet when she said, "Mama, you stayed down so late," the bang of a little pistol-shot was back somewhere in her voice. "Why Mr. Latz and I sat and talked." An almost imperceptible nerve was dancing against Mrs. Samstag's right temple. Alma could sense, rather than see the ridge of pain.
If you want me, Louis, it's got to be with her too. I couldn't give up my baby not my baby." "Why, Carrie, have your baby to your heart's content. She's got to be a fine girl to have you for a mother and now it will be my duty to please her as a father. Carrie will you have me?" "Oh, Louis Loo!" "Carrie, my dear!" And so it was that Carrie Samstag and Louis Latz came into their betrothal.
"Mamma, you you frighten me." "You like Louis Latz, don't you, Alma?" "Why, yes, mamma. Very much." "We can't all be young and handsome like Leo, can we?" "You mean ?" "I mean that finer and better men than Louis Latz aren't lying around loose. A man who treated his mother like a queen and who worked himself up from selling newspapers on the street to a millionaire." "Mamma?" "Yes, baby.
There was a time during the first months of the married life of Louis and Carrie Latz, when it seemed to Alma, who in the sanctity of her lovely little ivory bedroom all appointed in rose-enamel toilet trifles, could be prayerful with the peace of it, that the old Carrie, who could come pale and terrible out of her drugged nights, belonged to some grimacing and chimeric past.
Latz liked watching her. There you have it! Straight through the lacy mesh of the filet to the heart interest! Mr. Louis Latz, who was too short, slightly too stout, and too shy of likely length of swimming arm ever to have figured in any woman's inevitable visualization of her ultimate Leander, liked, fascinatedly, to watch Mrs. Samstag's nicely manicured fingers at work.
Weeks and weeks of this, and already Louis Latz's trousers were a little out of crease, and Mrs. Latz, after eight o'clock and under cover of a very fluffy and very expensive negligée, would unhook her stays. Sometimes friends came in for a game of small-stake poker, but after the second month they countermanded the standing order for Saturday night musical-comedy seats.
"Asked you what?" "Alma, it don't mean I'm not true to your father as I was the day I buried him in that blizzard back there, but could you ask for a finer, steadier man than Louis Latz? It looks out of his face." "Mama, you what are you saying?" "Alma?"
Suddenly Miss Samstag was her coolly firm little self, the bang of authority back in her voice. "You can't marry Louis Latz." "Can't I? Watch me." "You can't do that to a nice, deserving fellow like him!" "Do what?" "That!" Then Mrs. Samstag threw up both her hands to her face, rocking in an agony of self-abandon that was rather horrid to behold. "O God! why don't you put me out of it all?
In the lingo of Louis Latz, he was "a rattling good business man, too." He shared with his father partnership in a manufacturing business "Friedlander Clinical Supply Company" which, since his advent from high school into the already enormously rich firm, had almost doubled its volume of business. The kind of sweetness he found in Alma he could never articulate even to himself.
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