't
understand. But _you_ don't understand, Goldie, and that's a shame. If
you would put your mind on it, and study hard, like Mary Antin, you
would also stand high, and you would go to high school, and be
somebody."

"Would you send me to high school, pa?" Goldie asks, to test her
mother's promises. "Would you really?"

"Sure as I am a Jew," Mr. Rosenblum promptly replies, a look of
aspiration in his deep eyes. "Only show yourself worthy, Goldie, and
I'll keep you in school till you get to something. In America
everybody can get to something, if he only wants to. I would even send
you farther than high school--to be a teacher, maybe. Why not? In
America everything is possible. But you have to work hard, Goldie,
like Mary Antin--study hard, put your mind on it."

"Oh, I know it, pa!" Goldie exclaims, her momentary enthusiasm
extinguished at the thought of long lessons indefinitely prolonged.
Goldie was a restless little thing who could not sit long over her
geography book. She wriggled out of her mother's grasp now, and made
for the door, throwing a "back-hand" as she went, without losing a
single jackstone. "I hate long lessons," she said. "When I graduate
grammar school next year I'm going to work in Jordan-Marsh's big
store, and get three dollars a week, and have lots of fun with the
girls. I can't write pieces in the paper, anyhow.--Beckie! Beckie
Hurvich! Where you going? Wait a minute, I'll go along." And she was
off, leaving her ambitious parents to shake their heads over her
flightiness.

Mr. Rosenblum gave me my oil. If he had had postage stamps in stock,
he would have given me all I needed, and felt proud to think that he
was assisting in my important correspondences. And he was a poor man,
and had a large family, and many customers who paid as irregularly as
we. He ran the risk of ruin, of course, but he did not scold--not us,
at any rate. For he _understood_. He was himself an immigrant Jew of
the type that values education, and sets a great price on the higher
development of the child. He would have done in my father's place just
what my father was doing: borrow, beg, go without, run in
debt--anything to secure for a promising child the fulfilment of the
promise. That is what America was for. The land of opportunity it was,
but opportunities must be used, must be grasped, held, squeezed dry.
To keep a child of working age in school was to invest the meagre
present for the sake of the opulent future. If