"Say, women!" Max shouted, "you have been more than five minutes without kissing. What's the matter with you?"

At this, Sadie, with mock defiance, walked up to Mrs. Margolis, threw her arms around her, and gave her a luscious smack on the lips

"Bravo! And now you, kids!" Max commanded

With a merry chuckle the two little girls flew into each other's arms and kissed. Lucy had dark hair like Dora's, and Beckie flaxen hair like Sadie's, so when their heads were close together they were an amusing reduced copy of their mothers as these had looked embracing and kissing a minute before

Max often dropped in to see me at my factory, and when I was not busy we would talk of my cloaks, of his instalment business, or of women. Women were his great topic of conversation, as usual. But then these talks of his no longer found a ready listener in me. Now, that I knew his wife, they jarred on me. A decided change had come over me in this respect. I remember it vividly. It was as if his lewd discourses desecrated her name and thereby offended me. It may be interesting to note, however, that he never took up this kind of topics when we were in his house, not even when his wife was out

Sometimes I would have supper at his house. More often, however--usually on Monday, when Max seldom went to the dance-halls--I would come after supper and spend the rest of the evening there. Sometimes the Shorniks would drop in--Sadie, her husband, and Beckie. Ben Shornik and Max would play a game of pinochle, while I, who never cared for cards, would chat with the women or entertain them by entertaining the children. Ben--as I came into the habit of calling him--was a spare little man with an extremely high forehead. He was an insurance-collector and only one degree less illiterate than Max; but because he had the "forehead of a learned man," and because it was his business to go from house to house with a long, thick book under his arm, he affected longish hair, flowing black neckties, and a certain pomposity of manner. One of his ways of being tremendously American was to snap his fingers ferociously and to say, "I don't care a continental!" or, "One, two, three, and there you are!" The latter exclamation he would be continually murmuring to himself when he was absorbed in pinochle

CHAPTER V ONE evening, when the Shorniks and I were at Max's house, and Max and Ben were having their game of pinochle, the conversation between the women and myself turned upon Dora's efforts to obtain education through her little daughter. Encouraged by Sadie and myself, Dora let herself loose and told us much of Lucy's history, or, rather, of her own history as Lucy's mother. In her crude, lumbering way and with flushed cheeks she talked with profound frankness and quaint introspective insight, in the manner of one touching upon things that are enshined in innermost recesses of one's soul

She depicted the thrills of joyous surprise with which she had watched Lucy, in her infancy, master the beginnings of speech. Sometimes her delight would be accompanied by something akin to fright. There had been moments when it all seemed unreal and weird

"The little thing seemed to be a stranger to me," she said. "Or else, she did not seem to be a human being at all."

The next moment she would recognize her, as it were, and then she would kiss and yearn over her in a mad rush of passion

The day when she took Lucy to school--about two years before--was one of the greatest days in Dora's life. She would then watch her learn to associate written signs with spoken words as she had once watched her learn to speak.

But that was not all. She became jealous of the child. She herself had never been taught to read even Hebrew or Yiddish, much less a Gentile language, while here, lo and behold! her little girl possessed a Gentile book and was learning to read it. She was getting education, her child, just like the daughter of the landlord of the house in Russia in which Dora had grown up

"C-a-t--cat," Lucy would spell out. "R-a-t--rat. M-a-t--mat."

And poor Dora would watch the performance with mixed joy and envy and exclamations like: "What do you think of that snip of a thing! Did you ever?"

Lucy's school-reader achievements stirred a novel feeling of rivalry in Dora's breast. When the little girl could spell half a dozen English words she hated herself for her inferiority to her

"The idea of that kitten getting ahead of me! Why, it worried the life out of me!" she said. "You may think it foolish, but I couldn't help it. I kept saying to myself, 'She'll grow up and be an educated American lady and she'll be ashamed to walk in the street with me.' Don't we see things like that? People will beggar themselves to send their children to college, only to be treated as fools and greenhorns by them. I call that terrible. Don't you? Well, I am not going to let my child treat me like that. Not I. I should commit suicide first. I want my child to respect me, not to look down on me. If she reads a book she is to bear in mind that her mother is no ignorant slouch of a greenhorn, either."

A next-door neighbor, a woman who could read English, would help Lucy with her spelling lesson of an evening. This seemed to have established special relations between the child and that woman from which Dora was excluded

She made up her mind to learn to read. If Lucy could manage it, she, her mother, could. So she caused the child to teach her to spell out words in her First Reader. At first she pretended to treat it as a joke, but inwardly she took it seriously from the very outset, and later, under the intoxicating effect of the progress she was achieving, these studies became the great passion of her life. Whenever Lucy recited some new lines, learned at school, she would not rest until she, too, had learned them by heart.

Here are two "pieces" which she proudly recited to us: "The snow is white, The sky is blue, The sun is bright, And so are you."

"Our ears were made to hear, Our tongues were made to talk, Our eyes were made to see, Our feet were made to walk."

Her voice, as she declaimed the lines, attracted Lucy's attention, so she sent her and Beckie into the kitchen

"She doesn't know what a treasure she is to me," she said to us. Then, after she finished the two verses, she remarked, wistfully, "Well, my own life is lost, but she shall be educated."

"Why? Why should you talk like that, Dora?" Sadie protested, her fishy eyes full of tragedy. "Why, you are only beginning to live."

"Of course she is," I chimed in.

"Well," Dora rejoined, "anyhow, I am afraid I love her too much. Sometimes it seems to me I am going crazy over her. I love Dannie, too, of course.

When he happens to hurt a finger or to hit his dear little head against something I can't sleep. Is he not my flesh and blood like Lucy? Still, Lucy is different." She paused and then rose from her seat, saying, with a smile: "Wait. I am going to show you something." She went into the kitchen and came back, holding a tooth-brush in either hand. "Guess what it is."

"Two tooth-brushes," I answered, with perplexed gaiety

"Aren't you smart! I know they are not shoe-brushes, but what kind of tooth-brushes? How did I come by them? That's the question. Did I use a tooth-brush in my mother's house?"

She then told me how Lucy, coming from school one day, had announced an order from the teacher that every girl in the class must bring a tooth-brush the next morning

Sadie nodded confirmation

"Of course, I went to work and bought, not one brush, but two," Dora pursued. "I am as good as Lucy, am I not? If she is worth twelve cents, I am. And if she is American lady enough to use a tooth-brush, I am."

Lucy is not a usual name on the East Side. It was, in fact, the principal of the school who had recommended it, at Dora's solicitation. The little girl had hitherto been called Lizzie, the commonplace East Side version of Leah, her Hebrew name. Dora never liked it. It did not sound American enough, for there were Lizzies or Lizas in Europe, too. Any "greenhorn" might bear such a name. So she called on Lizzie's principal and asked her to suggest some "nicer name" for her daughter

"I want a real American one," she said

The principal submitted half a dozen names beginning with "L," and the result was that Lizzie became Lucy

Dora went over every spelling lesson with the child. It was so sweet to be helpful to her in this way. Lucy, on her part, had to reciprocate by hearing her mother spell the same words, and often they would have a spelling-match.

All of which, as I could see, had invested Lucy with the fascination of a spiritual companion

The child had not been at school many weeks when she began to show signs of estrangement from her mother-tongue. Her Yiddish was rapidly becoming clogged with queer-sounding "r's" and with quaintly twisted idioms. Yiddish words came less and less readily to her tongue, and the tendency to replace them with their English equivalents grew in persistence. Dora would taunt her on her "Gentile Yiddish," yet she took real pride in it. Finally, Lucy abandoned her native tongue altogether. She still understood her parents, of course, but she now invariably addressed them or answered their Yiddish questions in English. As a result, Dora would make efforts to speak to her in the language that had become the child's natural means of expression. It was a sorry attempt at first; but she was not one to give up without a hard struggle. She went at it with great tenacity, listening intently to Lucy's English and trying to repeat words and phrases after her. And so, with the child's assistance, conscious or unconscious, she