,
the hair was touzled.

At half-past five the stable-doors were thrown open, and the crowd
pressed through a long, narrow white-washed stone corridor into a
barn-like compartment, with a white-washed ceiling traversed by wooden
beams. Within this compartment, and leaving but a narrow, circumscribing
border, was a sort of cattle-pen, into which the paupers crushed,
awaiting amid discomfort and universal jabber the divine moment. The
single jet of gas-light depending from the ceiling flared upon the
strange simian faces, and touched them into a grotesque picturesqueness
that would have delighted Dore.

They felt hungry, these picturesque people; their near and dear ones
were hungering at home. Voluptuously savoring in imagination the
operation of the soup, they forgot its operation as a dole in aid of
wages; were unconscious of the grave economical possibilities of
pauperization and the rest, and quite willing to swallow their
independence with the soup. Even Esther, who had read much, and was
sensitive, accepted unquestioningly the theory of the universe that was
held by most people about her, that human beings were distinguished from
animals in having to toil terribly for a meagre crust, but that their
lot was lightened by the existence of a small and semi-divine class
called _Takeefim_, or rich people, who gave away what they didn't want.
How these rich people came to be, Esther did not inquire; they were as
much a part of the constitution of things as clouds and horses. The
semi-celestial variety was rarely to be met with. It lived far away from
the Ghetto, and a small family of it was said to occupy a whole house.
Representatives of it, clad in rustling silks or impressive broad-cloth,
and radiating an indefinable aroma of superhumanity, sometimes came to
the school, preceded by the beaming Head Mistress; and then all the
little girls rose and curtseyed, and the best of them, passing as
average members of the class, astonished the semi-divine persons by
their intimate acquaintance with the topography of the Pyrenees and the
disagreements of Saul and David, the intercourse of the two species
ending in effusive smiles and general satisfaction. But the dullest of
the girls was alive to the comedy, and had a good-humored contempt for
the unworldliness of the semi-divine persons who spoke to them as if
they were not going to recommence squabbling, and pulling one another's
hair, and copying one another's sums, and stea