"But it does do. So it seems."

As he continued to fume and rail at us, and I sat listening with a bored air, an idea flashed upon my mind, and, acting upon it on the spur of the moment, I suddenly laid a friendly hand on his arm

"Look here, Loeb," I said. "What's the use being excited? I have a scheme.

What's the matter with you selling goods for me?"

He was taken aback, but I could see that he was going to accept it

"What do you mean?" he asked, flushing

"I mean what I say. I want you to come with me. You will make more money than you have ever made before. You're a first-rate salesman, Loeb, and--well, it will pay you to make the change. What do you say?"

He contemplated the floor for a minute or two, and then, looking up awkwardly, he said: "I'll think it over. But you're a smart fellow, Levinsky. I can tell you that."

We proceeded to discuss details, and I received his answer--a favorable one--before we left our seats

To celebrate the event I had him dine with me that evening, our pledges of mutual loyalty being solemnized by a toast which we drank in the costliest champagne the hotel restaurant could furnish

It was not a year and a half after this episode that Chaikin entered my employ as designer

CHAPTER VI I SAW other girls with a view to marriage, but I was "too particular," as my friends, the Nodelmans, would have it. I had two narrow escapes from breach-of-promise suits.

"He has too much education," Nodelman once said to his wife in my presence.

"Too much in his head, don't you know. You think too much, Levinsky. That's what's the matter. First marry, and do your thinking afterward. If you stopped to think before eating you would starve to death, wouldn't you? Well, and if you keep on thinking and figuring if this girl's nose is nice enough and if that girl's eyes are nice enough, you'll die before you get married, and there are no weddings among the dead, you know."

My matrimonial aspirations made themselves felt with fits and starts. There were periods when I seemed to be completely in their grip, when I was restless and as though ready to marry the first girl I met. Then there would be many months during which I was utterly indifferent, enjoying my freedom and putting off the question indefinitely

Year after year slid by. When my thirty-ninth birthday became a thing of the past and I saw myself entering upon my fortieth year without knowing who I worked for I was in something like a state of despair. When I was a boy forty years had seemed to be the beginning of old age. This notion I now repudiated as ridiculous, for I felt as young as I had done ten, fifteen, or twenty years before; and yet the words "forty years" appalled me. The wish to "settle down" then grew into a passion in me. The vague portrait of a woman in the abstract seemed never to be absent from my mind. Coupled with that portrait was a similarly vague image of a window and a table set for dinner. That, somehow, was my symbol of home. Home and woman were one, a complex charm joining them into an inseparable force. There was the glamour of sex, shelter, and companionship in that charm, and of something else that promised security and perpetuity to the successes that fate was pouring into my lap. It whispered of a future that was to continue after I was gone

My loneliness often took on the pungence of acute physical discomfort. The more I achieved, the more painful was my self-pity

Nothing seemed to matter unless it was sanctified by marriage, and marriage now mattered far more than love

Girls had acquired a new meaning. They were not merely girls. They were matrimonial possibilities

Odd as it may appear, my romantic ideals of twenty years ago now reasserted their claim upon me. It was my ambition to marry into some orthodox family, well-to-do, well connected, and with an atmosphere of Talmudic education--the kind of match of which I had dreamed before my mother died, with such modifications as the American environment rendered natural

There were two distinct circumstances to account for this new mood in me

In the first place, my sense of approaching middle age somehow rekindled my yearning interest in the scenes of my childhood and boyhood. Memories of bygone days had become ineffably dear to me. I seemed to remember things of my boyhood more vividly than I did things that had happened only a year before

I was homesick for Antomir again

To revisit Abner's Court or the Preacher's Synagogue, to speak to Reb Sender, or to the bewhiskered old soldier, the skeepskin tailor, if they were still living, was one of my day-dreams.

Eliakim Zunzer, the famous wedding-bard whose songs my mother used to sing in her dear, sonorous contralto, had emigrated to America several years before and I had heard of it at the time of his arrival, yet I had never thought of going to see him. Now, however, I could not rest until I looked him up. It appeared that he owned a small printing-shop in a basement on East Broadway, so I called at his place one afternoon on the pretext of ordering some cards. When I saw the poet--an aged little man with a tragic, tired look on a cadaverous face--I was so unstrung that when a young man in the shop asked me something about the cards, he had to repeat the question before I understood it

"My mother used to sing your beautiful songs, Mr. Zunzer," I said to the poet some minutes later, my heart beating violently again.

"Did she? Where do you come from?" he asked, with a smile that banished the tired look, but deepened the tragic sadness of his death-like countenance

Everything bearing the name of my native place touched a tender spot in my heart. It was enough for a cloak-maker to ask me for a job with the Antomir accent to be favorably recommended to one of my foremen. A number of the men who received special consideration and were kept working in my shop in the slack seasons, when my force was greatly reduced, were fellow-townspeople of mine. This had been going on for several years, in fact, till gradually an Antomir atmosphere had been established in my shop, and something like a family spirit of which I was proud. We had formed a Levinsky Antomir Benefit Society of which I was an honorary member and which was made up, for the most part, of my own employees

All this, I confess, was not without advantage to my business interests, for it afforded me a low average of wages and safeguarded my shop against labor troubles. The Cloak-makers' Union had again come into existence, and, although it had no real power over the men, the trade was not free from sporadic conflicts in individual shops. My place, however, was absolutely immune from difficulties of this sort--all because of the Levinsky Antomir Benefit Society

If one of my operatives happened to have a relative in Antomir, a women's tailor who wished to emigrate to America, I would advance him the passage money, with the understanding that he was to work off the loan in my employ.

That the "green one" was to work for low wages was a matter of course. But then, in justice to myself, I must add that I did my men favors in numerous cases that could in no way redound to my benefit. Besides, the fiscal advantages that I did derive from the Antomir spirit of my shop really were not a primary consideration with me. I sincerely cherished that spirit for its own sake. Moreover, if my Antomir employees were willing to accept from me lower pay than they might have received in other places, their average earnings were actually higher than they would have been elsewhere. I gave them steady work. Besides, they felt perfectly at home in my shop. I treated them well. I was very democratic

Compared to the thoughts of home that had oppressed me during my first months in America, my new visions of Antomir were like the wistful lights of a sunset as compared with the glare of midday. But then sunsets produce deeper, if quieter, effects on the emotions than the strongest daylight

It was my new homesickness, then, which inclined me to an American form of the kind of marriage of which I used to dream in the days of my Talmudic studies. Another motive that led me to matrimonial aspirations of this kind lay in my new ideas of respectability as a necessary accompaniment to success. Marrying into a well-to-do orthodox family meant respectability and solidity. It implied law and order, the antithesis of anarchism, socialism, trade-unionism, strikes

I was a convinced free-thinker. Spencer's Unknowable had irrevocably replaced my God. Yet religion now appealed to me as an indispensable instrument in the great orchestra of things. From what I had seen of the world, or read about it in the daily press, I was convinced that but few people of wealth and power had real religion in their hearts. I felt sure that most of them looked upon churches or synagogues as they did upon police-courts; that they valued them primarily as safeguards of law and order and correctness, and this had become my attitude. For the rest, I felt that a vast number of the people who professed Christianity or Judaism did so merely because to declare oneself an atheist was not a prudent thing to do from a business or social point of view, or that they were in doubt and chose to be on the safe side of it, lest there should be a God, "after all," while millions of other people were not interested enough even to doubt, or to ask questions, and were content to do as everybody did. But there were some who did ask questions and did dare to declare themselves atheists. I was one of these, and yet I looked upon religion as a most important institution, and was willing to contribute to its support