ou do not want any thanks? So? But we Jews, we have more things
to give than thanks, and better things."

"I don't want anything," Lucas answered him. "I'm glad everything's
all right."

"You are very good," said the old man, "very good and generous. But
some day, perhaps, you will have a need--and then you will find that
our people do not forget."

The Jewess had nothing to take with her but her child. She bowed her
head and murmured something as she passed out, and the baby laughed
at him.

"Our people do not forget," repeated the old Jew, as he bowed himself
forth.

"Well," said Lucas, half aloud, when he was once more alone in his
room, "that's finished, anyhow."

It was the knell of his greater self, of the man he had contrived to
be for a few hours. He sat in his chair, dimly realizing it, with
vague and wordless regrets. Then, upon the table, he saw the flute,
and rose to put it in the cupboard. It would never be useful again,
but he did not want to throw it away.

The old dramas, which somehow came so close to reality with so little
art--or because of so little art--had a way of straddling time like
life itself. "Twenty years elapse between Acts II and III," the
playbills said unblushingly, and the fact is that what most men sow
at twenty they reap at forty; the twenty years do elapse between the
acts. The curtain that goes down on Robert Lucas in his room at
Tambov rises on Robert H. Lucas in New York, with the passage of time
marked on him as clearly as on a clock. With grey in his beard and
patches on his boots, and quarters in a boarding-house in Long Island
City, he is still concerned with leather, but no longer prosperous.
His work involves much calling on dealers and manufacturers, and
their manner of receiving him has done nothing to harden his manner
of diffidence and incompetence. His linen strives to be
inconspicuous; his clothes do not inspire respect; the total effect
of him is that of a man who has been at great pains to plant himself
in a wrong environment. Tambov now is no more than a memory; it is
less than an experience, for it has left the man unchanged. It is a
thing he has seen--not a thing he has lived.

The accident that gave his name and the address of his boarding-house
a place in the papers has no part in his story; he was an unimportant
witness in the trial of a man whom he had seen in the street cutting
blood-spots out of his clothing. He had bought a paper which
mentioned