It was a dark basement. There were only a few hours a day when one could read, even in the front, without a lamp. But it was Yetta's home. To be sure, she and her father slept at the Goldsteins' flat and had breakfast there. But by seven they were in the book-store. For lunch they had tea and buns from the coffee-house upstairs, and at six o'clock Yetta brought their dinner from her aunt's in a pail. At first the place had seemed to Yetta very large, and the darkness in the back limitless and fearsome. Once, when her father had gone back there and she could not see him, she had become frightened and called him. He, laughing at her timidity, had taken her in his arms and they had explored all the dark corners by candle-light. She always remembered the sense of relief which had come to her when she realized how small it was. Benjamin was thirty-four when this change in his life took place. With his scholarly turn of mind, it did not take him long to learn to read English fluently. But in his store on East Broadway he had little chance to speak the new language. Few of his customers spoke anything but Russian or Yiddish. Yetta always found it hard not to pronounce "book" "buk." This was the first word her father taught her. He was an insistent teacher. He realized his own inability to become an active unit in the seething, incomprehensible life about him. His explorations of the new world were meagre. He was tied to the store except on Saturday afternoons, and he could not desecrate the Sabbath by trolley rides. The poverty and misery which he could not ignore, he thought of as local. The unhappy lot of his people was due to their ignorance, their inability to understand the new language, their age-old habits of semiserfdom. But with Yetta it was to be different! She was to be fitted for full participation in the rich life of perfect freedom. He put especial emphasis on the language. There were few things which made him outspokenly angry. The principal ones were the Jewish papers. Yiddish was to him the language of the Kovna Ghetto, the language of persecutions and pogroms. The pure Hebrew of the Scriptures--Yes!--he would have every child of the Race know that. He taught it to Yetta. It was the reservoir of all the rich traditions and richer promises. But Yiddish was a bastard jargon which his people had learned in captivity. It held no treasures of the past, no future hope. Let his people supplement the language of their forefathers by one of freedom. Let them learn the speech of the land of Refuge. His contempt for Yiddish, of course, isolated him from everything vital in the life of the East Side, and drove him back farther into his dreams and to Yetta.