The Vertical City | Page 3

of flesh across the shoulders had been
carefully massaged of this tendency, fifteen minutes each night and
morning, by her daughter.
In fact, through the black transparency of her waist Mr. Latz thought
her plumply adorable.
It was about the eyes that Mrs. Samstag showed most plainly whatever
inroads into her clay the years might have gained. There were little dark
areas beneath them like smeared charcoal, and two unrelenting sacs that
threatened to become pouchy.
Their effect was not so much one of years, but they gave Mrs. Samstag,
in spite of the only slightly plump and really passable figure, the look
of one out of health. Women of her kind of sallowness can be found
daily in fashionable physicians' outer offices, awaiting X-ray
appointments.
What ailed Mrs. Samstag was hardly organic. She was the victim of
periodic and raging neuralgic fires that could sweep the right side of
her head and down into her shoulder blade with a great crackling and
blazing of nerves. It was not unusual for her daughter Alma to sit up
the one or two nights that it could endure, unfailing through the wee
hours in her chain of hot applications.
For a week, sometimes, these attacks heralded their comings with little
jabs, like the pricks of an exploring needle. Then the under-eyes began
to look their muddiest. They were darkening now and she put up two
fingers with a little pressing movement to her temple.
"You're a great little woman," reiterated Mr. Latz, rather riveting even
Mrs. Samstag's suspicion that here was no great stickler for variety of
expression.
"I try to be," she said, his tone inviting out in her a mood of sweet

forbearance.
"And a great sufferer, too," he said, noting the pressing fingers.
She colored under this delightful impeachment.
"I wouldn't wish one of my neuralgia spells to my worst enemy, Mr.
Latz."
"If you were mine--I mean--if--the--say--was mine--I wouldn't stop
until I had you to every specialist in Europe. I know a thing or two
about those fellows over there. Some of them are wonders."
Mrs. Samstag looked off, her profile inclined to lift and fall as if by
little pulleys of emotion.
"That's easier said than done, Mr. Latz, by a--widow who wants to do
right by her grown daughter and living so--high since the war."
"I--I--" said Mr. Latz, leaping impulsively forward on the chair that was
as tightly upholstered in effect as he in his modish suit, then clutching
himself there as if he had caught the impulse on the fly, "I just wish I
could help."
"Oh!" she said, and threw up a swift brown look from the lace making
and then at it again.
He laughed, but from nervousness.
"My little mother was an ailer, too."
"That's me, Mr. Latz. Not sick--just ailing. I always say that it's
ridiculous that a woman in such perfect health as I am should be such a
sufferer."
"Same with her and her joints."
"Why, except for this old neuralgia, I can outdo Alma when it comes to
dancing down in the grill with the young people of an evening, or
shopping."
"More like sisters than any mother and daughter I ever saw."
"Mother and daughter, but which is which from the back, some of my
friends put it," said Mrs. Samstag, not without a curve to her voice;
then, hastily: "But the best child, Mr. Latz. The best that ever lived. A
regular little mother to me in my spells."
"Nice girl, Alma."
"It snowed so the day of--my husband's funeral. Why, do you know
that up to then I never had an attack of neuralgia in my life. Didn't even
know what a headache was. That long drive. That windy hilltop with
two men to keep me from jumping into the grave after him. Ask Alma.

That's how I care when I care. But, of course, as the saying is, 'time
heals.' But that's how I got my first attack. 'Intenseness' is what the
doctors called it. I'm terribly intense."
"I--guess when a woman like you--cares like--you--cared, it's not much
use hoping you would ever--care again. That's about the way of it, isn't
it?"
If he had known it, there was something about his intensity of
expression to inspire mirth. His eyebrows lifted to little Gothic arches
of anxiety, a rash of tiny perspiration broke out over his blue shaved
face, and as he sat on the edge of his chair it seemed that inevitably the
tight sausagelike knees must push their way through mere fabric.
Ordinarily he presented the slightly bay-windowed, bay-rummed,
spatted, and somewhat jowled well-being of the Wall Street bachelor
who is a musical-comedy first-nighter, can dig the meat out of the
lobster claw whole, takes his beefsteak rare and with two or three