"And after the wedding?"

"After the wedding I knew that I was a married woman and must be contented," she parried

"But this is not love," I pressed her

"Oh, let us not talk of these things, pray! Don't ask me questions like that," she said in a low, entreating voice. "It isn't right."

"I don't know if it is right or wrong," I replied, also in a low voice. "All I do know is that I am interested in everything that ever happened to you

Silence fell. She was the first to break it. She tried to talk of trivialities. I scarcely listened. She broke off again

"Dora!" I said, amorously. "My heart is so full."

"Don't," she whispered, with a gesture of pained supplication. "Talk of something else, pray."

"I can't. I can't talk of anything else. Nor think of anything else, either."

"You mustn't, you mustn't, you mustn't," she said, with sudden vehemence, though still with a beseeching ring in her voice. "I won't let you. May I not live to see my children again if I will. Do you hear, Levinsky? Do you hear? Do you hear? I want you to understand it. Be a man. Have a heart, Levinsky. You must behave yourself. If you don't you'll have to move. There can't be any other way about it. If you are a real friend of mine, not an enemy, you must behave yourself." She spoke with deep, solemn earnestness, somewhat in the singsong of a woman reading the Yiddish Commentary on the Five Books of Moses or wailing over a grave. She went on: "Why should you vex me? You are a respectable man. You don't want to do what is wrong. You don't want to make me miserable, do you? So be good, Levinsky. I beg of you.

I beg of you. Be good. Be good. Be good. Let us never have another talk like this. Do you promise?"

I was silent

"Do you promise, Levinsky? You must. You must. Do you promise me never to come back to this kind of talk?"

"I do," I said, like a guilty school-boy

She was terribly in earnest. She almost broke my heart. I could not thwart her will

She was in love with me

Days passed. There was no lack of unspoken tenderness between us. That she was tremulously glad to see me every time I came home was quite obvious, but she bore herself in such a manner that I never ventured to allude to my feeling, much less to touch her hand or sit close to her.

"It is as well that I should not," I often said to myself. "Am I not happy as it is? Is it not bliss enough to have a home--her home? It would be too awful to forfeit it." I registered a vow to live up to the promise she had exacted from me, but I knew that I would break it

She was in love with me. She had an iron will, but I hoped that this, too, would soon be broken.

There were moments when I would work myself up to an exalted, religious kind of mood over it. "I should be a vile creature if I interfered with the peace of this house," I would exhort myself, passionately. "Max has been a warm friend to me. Oh, I will be good."

Dora talked less than usual. She, too, seemed to be a changed person. She was particularly taciturn when we happened to be alone in the house, and then it would be difficult for us to look each other in the face. Such tête-à-tˆtes occurred once or twice a week, quite late in the evening. I was very busy at the shop and I could never leave it before 10, 11, or even 12, except on Sabbath eve (Friday night), when it was closed. On those evenings when Max stayed out very late I usually found her alone in the little dining-room, sewing, mending, or--more often--poring over Lucy's school reader or story-book

After exchanging a few perfunctory sentences with her, each of us aware of the other's embarrassment, I would take a seat a considerable distance from her and take up a newspaper or clipping from one, while she went on with her work or reading. Lucy had begun to take juvenile books out of the circulating library of the Educational Alliance, so her mother would read them also. The words were all short and simple and Dora had not much difficulty in deciphering their meaning. Anyhow, she now never sought my assistance for her reading. I can still see her seated at the table, a considerable distance from me, moving her head from word to word and from line to line, and silently working her lips, as though muttering an incantation. I would do her all sorts of little services (though she never asked for any), all silently, softly, as if performing a religious rite

I have said that on such occasions I would read my newspaper or some clipping from it. In truth I read little else in those days. Editorials of the daily press interested me as much as the most sensational news, and if some of the more important leading articles in my paper had to be left unread on the day of their publication I would clip them and glance them over at the next leisure moment, sometimes days later

The financial column was followed by me with a sense of being a member of a caste for which it was especially intended, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. At first the jargon of that column made me feel as though I had never learned any English at all. But I was making headway in this jargon, too, and when I struck a recondite sentence I would cut the few lines out and put them in my pocket, on the chance of coming across somebody who could interpret them for me. Often, too, I would clip and put away a paragraph containing some curious piece of information or a bit of English that was an addition to my knowledge of the language. My inside pocket was always full of all sorts of clippings

CHAPTER XII I was about this time that I found myself confronted with an unexpected source of anxiety in my business affairs. There were several circumstances that made it possible for a financial midget like myself to outbid the lions of the cloak-and-suit industry. Now, however, a new circumstance arose which threatened to rob me of my chief advantage and to undermine the very foundation of my future

The rent of my loft, which was in the slums, was, comparatively speaking, a mere trifle, while my overhead expense amounted to scarcely anything at all.

I did my own bookkeeping, and a thirteen-year-old girl, American-born, school-bred, and bright, whose bewigged mother was one of my finishers, took care of the shop while I was out, helped me with my mail, and sewed on buttons between-whiles--all for four dollars a week. Another finisher, a young widow, saved me the expense of a figure woman. To which should be added that I did business on a profit margin far beneath the consideration of the well-known firms. All this, however, does not include the most important of all the items that gave me an advantage over the princes of the trade. That was cheap labor

Three of my men were excellent tailors. They could have easily procured employment in some of the largest factories, where they would have been paid at least twice as much as I paid them. They were bewhiskered, elderly people, strictly orthodox and extremely old-fashioned as to dress and habits. They felt perfectly at home in my shop, and would rather work for me and be underpaid than be employed in an up-to-date factory where a tailor was expected to wear a starched collar and necktie and was made the butt of ridicule if he covered his head every time he took a drink of water. These, however, were minor advantages. The important thing, the insurmountable obstacle which kept these three skilled tailors away from the big cloak-shops, was the fact that one had to work on Saturdays there, while in my place one could work on Sunday instead of Saturday

My pressers were of the same class as my tailors. As for my operators, who were younger fellows and had adopted American ways, my shop had other attractions for them. For example, my operations were limited to a very small number of styles, and, as theirs was piece-work, it meant greater earnings. While the employee of a Broadway firm (or of one of its contractors) was engaged on a large variety of garments, being continually shifted from one kind of work to another, a man working for me would be taken up with the same style for many days in succession, thus developing a much higher rate of speed and a fatter pay-envelope

Altogether, I always contrived to procure the cheapest labor obtainable, although this, as we have seen, by no means implied that my "hands" were inferior mechanics. The sum and substance of it all was that I could afford to sell a garment for less than what was its cost of production in the best-known cloak-houses

My business was making headway when the Cloak and Suit Makers' Union sprang into life again, with the usual rush and commotion, but with unusual portents of strength and stability. It seemed as if this time it had come to stay. My budding little establishment was too small, in fact, to be in immediate danger. It was one of a scattered number of insignificant places which the union found it difficult to control. Still, cheap labor being my chief excuse for being, the organization caused me no end of worry

"Just when a fellow is beginning to make a living all sorts of black dreams will come along and trip him up," I complained to Meyer Nodelman, bitterly.

"A bunch of good-for-nothings, too lazy to work, will stir up trouble, and there you are."

"Oh, it won't last long," Meyer Nodelman consoled me. "Don't be excited, anyhow. Business does not always go like grease, you know. You must be ready for trouble too."

He told me of his own experiences with unions and he drifted into a philosophic view of the matter. "You and I want to make as much money as possible, don't we?" he said. "Well, the