Lassalle.

'Ah, but the way he jumped on a table when only a schoolboy to
protest against the master's injustice to one of his schoolfellows!
How the divine fire flamed in him!'

They talked on, these clamorous sceptics, amplifying the Lassalle
legend, broidering it with Messianic myths, with the same fantastic
Oriental invention that had illuminated the plain Pentateuch with
imaginative vignettes, and transfiguring the dry abstractions of
Socialism with the same passionate personalization. He listened
impatiently. He had never been caught by Socialism, even at his
hungriest. He had once been an employer himself, and his point of view
survived.

They talked of the woman through whom Lassalle had met his death. One
of them had seen her on the American stage--a bouncing burlesque
actress.

'Like Yvonne Rupert?' he ventured to interpose.

'Yvonne Rupert?' They laughed. 'Ah, if Yvonne had only had such a
snap!' cried Melchitsedek Pinchas. 'To have jilted Lassalle and been
died for! What an advertisement!'

'It would have been on the bill,' agreed the table.

He asked if they thought Yvonne Rupert clever.

'Off the stage! There's nothing to her on,' said Pinchas.

The table roared as if this were a good joke. 'I dare say she would
play my Ophelia as well as Mrs. Goldwater,' Pinchas added zestfully.

'They say she has a Yiddish accent,' Elkan ventured again.

The table roared louder. 'I have heard of Yiddish-Deutsch,' cried
Pinchas, 'never of Yiddish-Francais!'

Elkan Mandle was frozen. By his disappointment he knew that he had
been hoping to meet Gittel again--that his resentment was dead.

IV

But the hope would not die. He studied the theatrical announcements,
and when Yvonne Rupert once again flashed upon New York he set out to
see her. But it struck him that the remote seat he could afford--for
it would not do to spend a week's wage on the mere chance--would be
too far off for precise identification, especially as she would
probably be theatrically transmogrified. No, a wiser as well as a more
economical plan would be to meet her at the stage-door, as he used to
meet Gittel. He would hang about till she came.

It was a long ride to the Variety Theatre, and, the weather being
sloppy, there was not even standing-room in the car, every foot of
which, as it plunged and heaved ship-like through the watery night,
was a suffocating jam of human beings, wedged on the seats, or
clinging tightly to the overh