for the benefit of the sallow-faced needle-woman, who
had found romance square so sadly with the realities of her own
existence. And so all a summer afternoon, Dutch Debby and Esther would
be rapt away to a world of brave men and fair women, a world of fine
linen and purple, of champagne and wickedness and cigarettes, a world
where nobody worked or washed shirts or was hungry or had holes in
boots, a world utterly ignorant of Judaism and the heinousness of eating
meat with butter. Not that Esther for her part correlated her conception
of this world with facts. She never realized that it was an actually
possible world--never indeed asked herself whether it existed outside
print or not. She never thought of it in that way at all, any more than
it ever occurred to her that people once spoke the Hebrew she learned to
read and translate. "Bobby" was often present at these readings, but he
kept his thoughts to himself, sitting on his hind legs with his
delightfully ugly nose tilted up inquiringly at Esther. For the best of
all this new friendship was that Bobby was not jealous. He was only a
sorry dun-colored mongrel to outsiders, but Esther learned to see him
almost through Dutch Debby's eyes. And she could run up the stairs
freely, knowing that if she trod on his tail now, he would take it as a
mark of _camaraderie_.

"I used to pay a penny a week for the _London Journal_," said Debby
early in their acquaintanceship, "till one day I discovered I had a
dreadful bad memory."

"And what was the good of that?" said Esther.

"Why, it was worth shillings and shillings to me. You see I used to save
up all the back numbers of the _London Journal_ because of the answers
to correspondents, telling you how to do your hair and trim your nails
and give yourself a nice complexion. I used to bother my head about that
sort of thing in those days, dear; and one day I happened to get reading
a story in a back number only about a year old and I found I was just
as interested as if I had never read it before and I hadn't the
slightest remembrance of it. After that I left off buying the _Journal_
and took to reading my big heap of back numbers. I get through them once
every two years." Debby interrupted herself with a fit of coughing, for
lengthy monologue is inadvisable for persons who bend over needle-work
in dark back rooms. Recovering herself, she added, "And then I start
afresh. You couldn't do that, could you?"

"No," admitted Esther,