Harlem house more often than in their summer home. Elsie was wrapped up in the socialist campaign, which kept her busy every night from the middle of July to Election Day. She practically had no vacation. Anna made arrangements to spend her brief vacation with some of her literary friends who had a camp in Maine, but while she was in the city she came home to her mother and Gracie almost every evening. As for her father, whom I saw several times during that summer, he often sat up far into the night in Malbin's or some other restaurant, talking "parcels." He had become so absorbed in his real-estate speculations that he was rarely seen at Yampolsky's café these days. One evening, when he was dining with me at the private hotel in which I lived, and we were discussing his ventures, he said: "Do you know, my friend, I have made more than twelve thousand dollars?"

He tried to say it in a matter-of-fact, business-like way, but his face melted into an expression of joy before he finished the sentence.

"I tell it to you because I know that you are a real friend and that you will be sincerely glad to hear it," he went on

"I certainly am. I'm awfully glad," I rejoined, fervently

"I expect to make more. No more chipping in by the children! Anna shall give up her typewriting and Elsie her teaching. Yes, things are coming my way at last."

"Still, if I were you, I should go slow. The real-estate market is an uncertain thing, after all."

"Of course it is," he answered, mechanically

Since I bought that Brooklyn parcel and refused to go into further real-estate operations he had never approached me with business schemes again. There was not the slightest alloy of self-interest in his friendship, and he was careful not to have it appear that there was. He never initiated me into the details of his speculations, lest I should offer him a loan. He was quite squeamish about it

One day I offered him a hundred-dollar check for The Pen, the Hebrew weekly with which he was connected and upon which I knew him to spend more than he could afford

"I don't want it," he said, reddening and shaking his head

"Why?" I asked, also reddening

I was sorely hurt and he noticed it

"I know that you do it whole-heartedly," he hastened to explain, "but I don't want to feel that you do it for my sake."

"But I don't do it for your sake. I just want to help the paper. Can't I--" He interrupted me with assurances of his regard for me and for my motives, and accepted the check.

Was he dreaming of Anna ultimately agreeing to marry me--and my money? He certainly considered me a most desirable match. But I felt sure that he was fond of me on my personal account and that he would have liked to have me for his son-in-law even if my income had not exceeded three or four thousand dollars a year. He did not share the radical views of his children. He was much nearer to my point of view than they

CHAPTER V IT was December. There was an air of prosperity in Tevkin's house, but the girls would not give up their jobs. I was a frequent caller again. I was burning to take Anna, Elsie, and their parents to the theater, but was afraid the two girls would spurn the invitation

One day I was agreeably surprised by Elsie asking me to buy some tickets for a socialist ball. They were fifty cents apiece

"How many do you want me to take?" I asked

"As many as you can afford," she answered, roguishly

"Will you sell me twenty-five dollars' worth?"

"Oh, that would be lovely!" she said, in high glee

When I handed her the money I was on the brink of asking if it might not be rejected as "tainted," but suppressed the pleasantry

For me to attend a socialist ball would have meant to face a crowd of union men. It was out of the question. But the twenty-five dollars somehow brought me nearer to Elsie, and that meant to Anna also. I began to feel more at home in their company. Elsie was as dear as a sister to me. I went so far as to venture to invite them and their parents to the opera, and my invitation was accepted. I was still merely "a friend of father's," something like an uncle, but I saw a ray of hope now

"Suppose a commonplace business man like myself offered you a check for Minority," I once said to Anna.

"A check for Minority?" she echoed, with joyful surprise. "Well, it would be accepted with thanks, of course, but you would first have to withdraw the libel 'the commonplace business man.' Another condition is that you must promise to read the magazine." As I was making out the check I told her that I had read some issues of it and that I "solemnly swore" to read it regularly now. That I had found it an unqualified bore I omitted to announce. Shortly after that opera night Tevkin provided a box at one of the Jewish theaters for a play by Jacob Gordin

I was quite chummy with the girls. They would jokingly call me "Mr.

Capitalist" and, despite their father's protests, "bleed" me for all sorts of contributions. One of these came near embroiling me with Moissey. It was for a revolutionary leader, a Jew, who had recently escaped from a Siberian prison in a barrel of cabbage and whose arrival in New York (by way of Japan and San Francisco) had been the great sensation of the year among the socialists of the East Side. The new-comer was the founder of a party of terrorists and had organized a plot which had resulted in the killing of an uncle of the Czar and of a prime minister. Now, Moissey, in his rabid, uncompromising way, sympathized with another party of Russian revolutionists, with one that was bitterly opposed to the theories and methods of the terrorists. So when he learned that Anna was collecting funds for the man who had been smuggled out of jail in a barrel, and that I had given her a check for him, he flared up and called her "busybody."

"You had better mind your own affairs, Moissey," she retorted, coloring

She essayed to defend her position, contending that the methods of the Russian Government rendered terrorism not only justifiable, but inevitable

"The question is not whether it is justifiable, but whether there is any sense to it," Moissey replied, sneeringly. "Revolutions are not made by plotting or bomb-throwing. They must take the form of an uprising by the masses."

"As if the Russian terrorists did not have the masses back of them! The peasantry and the educated classes are with them."

"How do you know they are?" Moissey asked, with a good-natured, but patronizing, smile

He spoke of the Russian working class as the great element that was destined to work out the political and economic salvation of the country, and at this he tactlessly dwelt on the Russian trade-unions, on what he termed their revolutionary strikes, and upon the aid Russian capitalists gave the Government in its crusade upon the struggle for liberty

I felt quite awkward. I wondered whether he was not saying these things designedly to punish me for the check I had given Anna for the terrorists.

He had always seemed to hold aloof from me, as if he were opposed to the visits of the "money-bag" that I was at his father's house. At this minute I felt as though his eyes said, "The idea of this fleecer of labor contributing to the struggle for liberty!"

I was burning to tell him that he lacked manners, and to assail trade-unionism, but I restrained myself, of course

Sometimes the girls and I would discuss the social question or literature, subjects upon which they assured me that I held "naïve" views. But all my efforts to get Anna into a more intimate conversation failed. For all our familiarity, it seemed as if we held our conversations through a thick window-pane. Nevertheless, in a very vague way, and for no particular reason that I was aware of, I thought that I sensed encouragement

Tevkin never again approached me with his real-estate ventures, but the very air of his house these days was full of such ventures. I met other real-estate men at his home. Their talk was tempting. my enormous income notwithstanding. Huge fortunes seemed to be growing like mushrooms all over the five Ghettos of New York and Brooklyn. I saw men who three years ago had not been worth a cent and who were now buying and selling blocks of property. How much they were actually worth was a question which in the excitement of the "boom" did not seem to matter. It is never a rare incident among our people for a man with a nebulous fortune of a few hundred dollars to plunge into a commercial undertaking involving many thousands; but during that period this was an every-day affair. At first I treated it like something that was going on in another country. But I had a good deal of uninvested money and my resistance was slackening.

At last I succumbed

One of the men I met at Tevkin's was Volodsky, the old-time street peddler, the man of the beautiful teeth whose push-cart had adjoined mine in those gloomy days when I tried to sell goods in the streets, and who had told me of the dower-money which his sister had lent him for his journey to America.

I had not seen him since then--an interval of over twenty years--and we recognized each other with some difficulty

The real-estate boom had found him eking out a wretched livelihood by selling goods on the instalment plan. Most of his business had been in the Italian quarter and he had learned to