l her dominant
thought. It hardly needed a woman to divine how it fretted Mrs. Jacobs
that Hannah was an old maid; it needed a woman like Esther to divine
that Hannah's renunciation was voluntary, though even Esther could not
divine her history nor understand that her mother's daily nagging was
the greater because the pettier part of her martyrdom.

* * * * *

They all jumbled themselves into grotesque combinations, the things of
to-day and the things of endless yesterdays, as Esther slept in the
narrow little bed next to Dutch Debby, who squeezed herself into the
wall, pretending to revel in exuberant spaciousness. It was long before
she could get to sleep. The excitement of the day had brought on her
headache; she was depressed by restriking the courses of so many narrow
lives; the glow of her new-found mission had already faded in the
thought that she was herself a pauper, and she wished she had let the
dead past lie in its halo, not peered into the crude face of reality.
But at bottom she felt a subtle melancholy joy in understanding herself
at last, despite Hannah's scepticism; in penetrating the secret of her
pessimism, in knowing herself a Child of the Ghetto.

And yet Pesach Weingott played the fiddle merrily enough when she went
to Becky's engagement-party in her dreams, and galoped with Shosshi
Shmendrik, disregarding the terrible eyes of the bride to be: when
Hannah, wearing an aureole like a bridal veil, paired off with Meckisch,
frothing at the mouth with soap, and Mrs. Belcovitch, whirling a
medicine-bottle, went down the middle on a pair of huge stilts, one a
thick one and one a thin one, while Malka spun round like a teetotum,
throwing Ezekiel in long clothes through a hoop; what time Moses Ansell
waltzed superbly with the dazzling Addie Leon, quite cutting out Levi
and Miriam Hyams, and Raphael awkwardly twisted the Widow Finkelstein,
to the evident delight of Sugarman the _Shadchan_, who had effected the
introduction. It was wonderful how agile they all were, and how
dexterously they avoided treading on her brother Benjamin, who lay
unconcernedly in the centre of the floor, taking assiduous notes in a
little copy-book for incorporation in a great novel, while Mrs. Henry
Goldsmith stooped down to pat his brown hair patronizingly.

Esther thought it very proper of the grateful _Greeners_ to go about
offering the dancers rum from Dutch Debby's tea-kettle, and very selfish