kissed her? Had she always remembered me with a gleam of romantic interest? Did I stir her merely as she stirred me--as a living fragment of her past? Or was she trying to cultivate me in the professional interests of her husband, who was practising medicine in Harlem? When the curtain had fallen again Matilda made her husband change seats with me. I was to stay by her side through the rest of the performance. The partition between the two boxes being only waist-high, the two parties were practically joined into one and everybody was satisfied--everybody except Mrs. Chaikin

"I suppose our company isn't good enough for Mr. Levinsky," she said, aloud

When the performance was over we all went to Lorber's--the most pretentious restaurant on the East Side. Matilda and I were mostly left to ourselves. We talked of our native town and of her pious mother, who had died a few years before, but we carefully avoided the few weeks which I had spent in her mother's house, when Matilda had encouraged my embraces. In answer to my questions she told me something of her own and her husband's revolutionary exploits. She spoke boastfully and yet reluctantly of these things, as if it were a sacrilege to discuss them with a man who was, after all, a "money-bag."

My impression was that they lived very modestly and that they were more interested in their socialist affairs than in their income. My theory that she wanted her husband to profit by her acquaintance with me seemed to be exploded. She reminded me of Elsie and her whole-hearted devotion to socialism. We mostly spoke in Yiddish, and our Antomir enunciation was like a bond of kinship between us, and yet I felt that she spoke to me in the patronizing, didactical way which one adopts with a foreigner, as though the world to which she belonged was one whose interests were beyond my comprehension

She inquired about my early struggles and subsequent successes. I told her of the studies I had pursued before I went into business, of the English classics I had read, and of my acquaintance with Spencer

"Do you remember what you told me about becoming an educated man?" I said, eagerly. "Your words were always ringing in my ears. It was owing to them that I studied for admission to college. I was crazy to be a college man, but fate ordained otherwise. To this day I regret it."

In dwelling on my successes I felt that I was too effusive and emphatic; but I went on bragging in spite of myself. I tried to correct the impression I was making on her by boasting of the sums I had given to charity, but this made me feel smaller than ever. However, my talk did not seem to arouse any criticism in her mind. She listened to me as she might to the tale of a child

Referring to my uumarried state, she said, with unfeigned sympathy: "This is really no life. You ought to get married." And she added, gaily, "If you ever marry, you mustn't neglect to invite me to the wedding."

"I certainly won't; you may be sure of that," I said

"You must come to see me. I'll call you up on the telephone some day and we'll arrange it."

"I shall be very glad, indeed."

I departed in a queer state of mind. Her present identity failed to touch a romantic chord in my heart. She was simply a memory, like Dora. But as a memory she had rekindled some of the old yearning in me. I was still in love with Anna, but at this moment I was in love both with her and with the Matilda of twenty-three years before. But this intense feeling for Matilda as a monument of my past self did not last two days

The invitation she had promised to telephone never came

I came across a man whom I used to see at the Tevkins', and one of the things he told me was that Anna had recently married a high-school teacher

CHAPTER III THE real estate boom collapsed. The cause of the catastrophe lay in the nature, or rather in the unnaturalness, of the "get-rich-quick" epidemic.

Its immediate cause, however, was a series of rent strikes inspired and engineered by the Jewish socialists through their Yiddish daily. One of the many artificialities of the situation had been a progressive inflation of rent values. Houses had been continually changing hands, being bought, not as a permanent investment, but for speculation, whereupon each successive purchaser would raise rents as a means of increasing the market price of his temporary property. And so the socialists had organized a crusade that filled the municipal courts with dispossess cases and turned the boom into a panic

Hundreds of people who had become rich overnight now became worse than penniless overnight. The Ghetto was full of dethroned "kings for a day only." It seemed as if it all really had been a dream

One of the men whose quickly made little fortune burst like a bubble was poor Tevkin. I wondered how his children took the socialist rent strikes

Nor did I escape uninjured when the crisis broke loose. I still had a considerable sum in real estate, all my efforts to extricate it having proved futile. My holdings were rapidly depreciating. In hundreds of cases similar to mine equities were wiped out through the speculators' inability to pay interest on mortgages or even taxes. To be sure, things did not come to such a pass in my case, but then some of the city lots or improved property in which I was interested had been hit so hard as to be no longer worth the mortgages on them

Volodsky lost almost everything except his courage and speculative spirit

"Oh, it will come back," he once said to me, speaking of the boom

When I urged that it had been an unnatural growth he retorted that it was the collapse of the boom which was unnatural. He was scheming some sort of syndicate again

"It requires no money to make a lot of money," he said. "All it does require is brains and some good luck."

Nevertheless, he coveted some of my money for his new scheme. He did not succeed with me, but he found other "angels." He was now quite in his element in the American atmosphere of breathless enterprise and breakneck speed. When the violence of the crisis had quieted down building operations were resumed on a more natural basis. Men like Volodsky, with hosts of carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers--all Russian or Galician Jews--continued to build up the Bronx, Washington Heights, and several sections of Brooklyn.

Vast areas of meadowland and rock were turned by them, as by a magic wand, into densely populated avenues and streets of brick and mortar. Under the spell of their activity cities larger than Odessa sprang up within the confines of Greater New York in the course of three or four years

Mrs. Chaikin came out of her speculations more than safe. She and her husband, who is still in my employ, own half a dozen tenement-houses. One day, on the first of the month, I met her in the street with a large hand-bag and a dignified mien. She was out collecting rent

CHAPTER IV IT was the spring of 1910. The twenty-fifth anniversary of my coming to America was drawing near. The day of an immigrant's arrival in his new home is like a birthday to him. Indeed, it is more apt to claim his attention and to warm his heart than his real birthday. Some of our immigrants do not even know their birthday. But they all know the day when they came to America. It is Landing Day with red capital letters. This, at any rate, is the case with me. The day upon which I was born often passes without my being aware of it.

The day when I landed in Hoboken, on the other hand, never arrives without my being fully conscious of the place it occupies in the calendar of my life. Is it because I do not remember myself coming into the world, while I do remember my arrival in America? However that may be, the advent of that day invariably puts me in a sentimental mood which I never experience on the day of my birth

It was 1910, then, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of my coming was near at hand. Thoughts of the past filled me with mixed joy and sadness. I was overcome with a desire to celebrate the day. But with whom? Usually this is done by "ship brothers," as East-Siders call fellow-immigrants who arrive here on the same boat. It came back to me that I had such a ship brother, and that it was Gitelson. Poor Gitelson! He was still working at his trade.

I had not seen him for years, but I had heard of him from time to time, and I knew that he was employed by a ladies' tailor at custom work somewhere in Brooklyn. (The custom-tailoring shop he had once started for himself had proved a failure.) Also, I knew how to reach a brother-in-law of his. The upshot was that I made an appointment with Gitelson for him to be at my office on the great day at 12 o'clock. I did so without specifying the object of the meeting, but I expected that he would know

Finally the day arrived. It was a few minutes to 12. I was alone in my private office, all in a fidget, as if the meeting I was expecting were a love-tryst. Reminiscences and reflections were flitting incoherently through my mind. Some of the events of the day which I was about to celebrate loomed up like a ship seen in the distance. My eye swept the expensive furniture of my office. I thought of the way my career had begun. I thought of the Friday evening when I met Gitelson on Grand Street, he an American dandy and I in tatters. The fact that it was upon his advice and with his ten dollars that I had become a cloak-maker stood out as large as life before me. A great feeling of gratitude welled up in me, of gratitude and of pity for my tattered self of those days. Dear, kind Gitelson! Poor fellow! He was still working with his needle. I was seized with a desire to do something for him.

I had never paid him those ten dollars. So I was going to do so with "substantial interest" now. "I shall spend a few hundred