ut
who'd have _me_? Ah, here are the _Greeners_!" and her smile softened to
angelic tenderness.

It was a frowzy, unsightly group that sat on the pavement, surrounded by
a semi-sympathetic crowd--the father in a long grimy coat, the mother
covered, as to her head, with a shawl, which also contained the baby.
But the elders were naively childish and the children uncannily elderly;
and something in Esther's breast seemed to stir with a strange sense of
kinship. The race instinct awoke to consciousness of itself. Dulled by
contact with cultured Jews, transformed almost to repulsion by the
spectacle of the coarsely prosperous, it leaped into life at the appeal
of squalor and misery. In the morning the Ghetto had simply chilled her;
her heart had turned to it as to a haven, and the reality was dismal.
Now that the first ugliness had worn off, she felt her heart warming.
Her eyes moistened. She thrilled from head to foot with the sense of a
mission--of a niche in the temple of human service which she had been
predestined to fill. Who could comprehend as she these stunted souls,
limited in all save suffering? Happiness was not for her; but service
remained. Penetrated by the new emotion, she seemed to herself to have
found the key to Hannah's holy calm.

With the money now in hand, the two girls sought a lodging for the poor
waifs. Esther suddenly remembered the empty back garret in No. 1 Royal
Street, and here, after due negotiations with the pickled-herring dealer
next door, the family was installed. Esther's emotions at the sight of
the old place were poignant; happily the bustle of installation, of
laying down a couple of mattresses, of borrowing Dutch Debby's
tea-things, and of getting ready a meal, allayed their intensity. That
little figure with the masculine boots showed itself but by fits and
flashes. But the strangeness of the episode formed the undercurrent of
all her thoughts; it seemed to carry to a climax the irony of her
initial gift to Hannah.

Escaping from the blessings of the _Greeners_, she accompanied her new
friend to Reb Shemuel's. She was shocked to see the change in the
venerable old man; he looked quite broken up. But he was chivalrous as
of yore: the vein of quiet humor was still there, though his voice was
charged with gentle melancholy. The Rebbitzin's nose had grown sharper
than ever; her soul seemed to have fed on vinegar. Even in the presence
of a stranger the Rebbitzin could not quite concea