I had not been walking five minutes when I impatiently returned to the hotel to consult the time-tables

CHAPTER II I WAS chatting with Rivesman, the lessee of the hotel, across the counter that separated part of his office from the lobby. As I have said, I had known him for many years. He had formerly been in the insurance business, and he had at one time acted as my insurance broker. He was a Talmudist, and well versed in modern Hebrew literature, to boot. He advised me concerning trains to Tannersville, and then we passed to the hotel business and mutual acquaintances

Presently Miss Tevkin, apparently on her way from her room, paused at the counter, by my side, to leave her key. She was dressed for dinner, although it was not yet half past 4 o'clock and the great Saturday-evening repast, for which train after train was bringing husbands and other "weekenders" to the mountains, was usually a very late affair

The dress she now wore was a modest gown of navy blue trimmed with lace. The change of attire seemed to have produced a partial change in her identity.

She was interesting in a new way, I thought

"Going to enjoy the fresh air?" Rivesman asked her, gallantly

"Ye-es," she answered, pleasantly. "It's glorious outside." And she vanished

"Pretty girl," I remarked

"And a well-bred one, too--in the real sense of the word."

"One of your two-week guests, I suppose," I said, with studied indifference.

"Yes. She is a stenographer." Whereupon he named a well-known lawyer, a man prominent in the affairs of the Jewish community, as her employer. "It was an admirer of her father who got the job for her."

From what followed I learned that Miss Tevkin's father had once been a celebrated Hebrew poet and that he was no other than the hero of the romance of which Naphtali had told me a few months before I left my native place to go to America, and that her mother was the heroine of that romance. In other words, her mother was the once celebrated beauty, the daughter of the famous Hebrew writer (long since deceased), Doctor Rachaeless of Odessa

"It was her father, then, who wrote those love-letters!" I exclaimed, excitedly. "And it was about her mother that he wrote them! Somebody told me on the veranda that her name was Miss Tevkin. I did think the name sounded familiar, but I could not locate it." The discovery stirred me inordinately. I was palpitating with reminiscent interest and with a novel interest in the beautiful girl who had just stood by my side

At my request Rivesman, followed by myself, sought her out on the front porch and introduced me to her as "a great admirer of your father's poetry."

Seated beside her was a bald-headed man with a lone wisp of hair directly over his forehead whom the hotel-keeper introduced as "Mr. Shapiro, a counselor," and who by his manner of greeting me showed that he was fully aware of my financial standing

The old romance of the Hebrew poet and his present wife, and more especially the fact that I had been thrilled by it in Antomir, threw a halo of ineffable fascination around their beautiful daughter

"So you are a daughter of the great Hebrew poet," I said in English

"It's awfully kind of you to speak like that," she returned

"Mr. Levinsky is known for his literary tastes, you know," Shapiro put in

"I wish I deserved the compliment," I rejoined. "Unfortunately, I don't. I am glad I find time to read the newspapers

"The newspapers are life," observed Miss Tevkin, "and life is the source of literature, or should be."

"'Or should be!'" Shapiro mocked her, fondly. "Is that a dig at the popular novels?" And in an aside to me, "Miss Tevkin has no use for them, you know."

She smiled

"Still worshiping at the shrine of Ibsen?" he asked her

"More than ever," she replied, gaily.

"I admire your loyalty, though I regret to say that I am still unable to share your taste."

"It isn't a matter of taste," she returned. "It depends on what one is looking for in a play or a novel."

She smiled with the air of one abstaining from a fruitless discussion

"She's a blue-stocking," I said to myself. "Women of this kind are usually doomed to be old maids." And yet she drew me with a magnetic force that seemed to be beyond my power of resistance

It was evident that she enjoyed the discussion and the fact that it was merely a pretext for the lawyer to feast his eyes on her

I wondered why a bald-headed man with a lone tuft of hair did not repel her

A younger brother of Shapiro's, a real-estate broker, joined us. He also was bald-headed, but his baldness formed a smaller patch than the lawyer's

The two brothers did most of the talking, and, among other things, they informed Miss Tevkin and myself that they were graduates of the City College. With a great display of reading and repeatedly interrupting each other they took up the cudgels for the "good old school." I soon discovered, however, that their range was limited to a small number of authors, whose names they uttered with great gusto and to whom they returned again and again. These were Victor Hugo, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Coleridge, Edgar Poe, and one or two others. If the lawyer added a new name, like Walter Pater, to his list, the real-estate man would hasten to trot out De Quincey, for example. For the rest they would parade a whole array of writers rather than refer to any one of them in particular. The more they fulminated and fumed and bullied Miss Tevkin the firmer grew my conviction that they had scarcely read the books for which they seemed to be ready to lay down their lives

Miss Tevkin, however, took them seriously. She followed them with the air of a "good girl "listening to a lecture by her mother or teacher

"I don't agree with you at all," she would say, weakly, from time to time, and resume listening with charming resignation

The noise made by the two brothers attracted several other boarders. One of these was a slovenly-looking man of forty-five who spoke remarkably good English with a very bad accent (far worse than mine). That he was a Talmudic scholar was written all over his face. By profession he was a photographer.

His name was Mendelson. He took a hand in our discussion, and it at once became apparent that he had read more and knew more than the bald-headed brothers. He was overflowing with withering sarcasm and easily sneered them into silence

Miss Tevkin was happy. B.ut the slovenly boarder proved to be one of those people who know what they do not want rather than what they do. And so he proceeded, in a spirit of chivalrous banter, to make game of her literary gods as well.

"You don't really mean to tell us that you enjoy an Ibsen play?" he demanded. "Why, you are too full of life for that."

"But that's just what the Ibsen plays are--full of life," she answered. "If you're bored by them it's because you're probably looking for stories, for 'action.' But art is something more significant than that. There is moral force and beauty in Ibsen which one misses in the old masters."

"That's exactly what the ministers of the gospel or the up-to-date rabbis are always talking about--moral force, moral beauty, and moral clam-chowder," Mendelson retorted

The real-estate man uttered a chuckle

"Would you turn the theater into a church or a reform synagogue?" the photographer continued. "People go to see a play because they want to enjoy themselves, not because they feel that their morals need darning."

"But in good literature the moral is not preached as a sermon," Miss Tevkin replied. "It naturally follows from the life it presents. Anyhow, the other kind of literature is mere froth. You read page after page and there doesn't seem to be any substance to it." She said it plaintively, as though apologizing for holding views of this kind

"Is that the way you feel about Thackeray and Dickens, too?" I ventured

"I do," she answered, in the same doleful tone

She went on to develop her argument. We did not interrupt her, the two brothers, the photographer, and myself listening to her with admiring glances that had more to do with her beautiful face and the music of her soft, girlish voice than with what she was saying. There was a congealed sneer on the photographer's face as he followed her plea, but it was full of the magic of her presence

"You're a silly child," his countenance seemed to say. "But I could eat you, all the same."