sed
through earlier in the day (with their big hospitals, their big
breweries, their big tabernacles, their workmen's lodging-houses, their
Cinema picture palaces, their Jewish theatres, and their numberless
public houses); and then the barrier of squalid space which would divide
me from baby, if I obtained employment in the West End, seemed to be
immeasurably greater and more frightening than the space that had
divided me from Martin when he was at the other end of the world.

Not all the allurements of my dream were sufficient to reconcile me to
such a dangerous separation.

"It's impossible," I thought. "Quite impossible."

Insensibly my rapid footsteps slackened. When I reached that part of the
Mile End Road in which the Jewish tailors live, and found myself
listening to a foreign language which I afterwards knew to be Yiddish,
and looking at men with curls at each side of their sallow faces,
slithering along as if they were wearing eastern slippers without heels,
I stopped, without knowing why, at the corner of a street where an
Italian organ-man was playing while a number of bright-eyed Jewish
children danced.

I was still looking on, hardly thinking of what I saw, when my eyes fell
on an advertisement, pasted on the window of a sausage-and-ham shop at
the corner. In large written characters it ran:

_Seamstress Wanted. Good Wages.
Apply No. ---- Washington Street_.

How little are the things on which our destiny seems to hang! In a
moment I was remembering what Mrs. Oliver had said about my being a good
seamstress; and, almost before I knew what I was about, I was hurrying
up the side street and knocking with my knuckles at an open door.

A rather fat and elderly Jewess, covered with rings and gold chains, and
wearing a manifest black wig, came from a room at one side of the lobby.
I explained my errand, and after she had looked me over in a sort of
surprise, as if I had not been the kind of person she expected, she
said, in a nasal and guttural voice:

"Vait! My daughter, she speaks very vell Ainglish."

Then turning her head over her shoulder, she pitched her voice several
octaves higher and cried, "Miriam," whereupon there came tripping
downstairs a Jewish girl of about eighteen, with large black eyes, thick
black hair, and such a dear good face.

I repeated my application, and after the girl had interpreted my request
to her mother, I was asked into the lobby, and put through a kind of