As soon as she was old enough she went to the closely packed public school near by. While she was away, he read hungrily. He had cleared a shelf in the darkest corner of the store, and there he put by all the books which pleased him--those he wanted her to read when she grew old enough. They were not for sale. Yetta got very little play during her childhood. Back in the store, after school hours, she perched up on a high stool beside her father and went over her lessons with him. At the end of the first year Benjamin's bank account had decreased by five hundred dollars. It had been a rare month when the total sales had equalled the month's rent and living expenses. But he was not depressed. A customer asked him one time about his business. "Although I do not sell many books," Benjamin replied, "I have much time to read." The second year would have been worse except for the lucky chance which secured him the agency for some Russian newspapers and considerably increased his income. If he had not so stubbornly refused to have anything to do with Yiddish, the store might have become prosperous, for he gradually learned the business and grew to use some judgment in replenishing his stock. His quaint philosophy attracted a little group of admirers. Even if they did not entirely accept his dreams, they liked to hear him talk about them. In this environment Yetta grew into girlhood. Every day when her school work was finished she read aloud to her father from the books he had placed on the reserved shelf. It was a planless mixture--a History of the Jews, Motley and Prescott, Shakespeare and Dickens and Emerson. The last thing she read to him was a three-volume edition of _Les Miserables_. She was fifteen then, and her reading was frequently interrupted by his coughs. Perhaps he had caught it from the lad who was racing with death to graduate from the Encyclopedia. Benjamin's friends shook their heads mournfully. But he expected to recover soon; was he not taking his "patent medicine" regularly? And so to the wonderful symphony of Hugo's masterpiece Benjamin coughed out his life. The third volume was read, not in the little store, but in their bedroom in the Goldstein's flat. It was the last book Yetta read for several years. When it was finished, she had begun to be afraid; she did not have the courage to begin a new book. He was too sick to listen. CHAPTER II YETTA'S GIRLHOOD The death of her father was a greater catastrophe to Yetta than she realized. She felt only the personal loss. Her uncle took care of the financial matters, sold the book-store, and so forth. When the funeral expenses were paid, he said there was nothing left. Coming back from the cemetery, her aunt, in as kindly a manner as was possible to so woe-begone and soured a woman, tried to explain to her what it meant to be penniless. Leave school? Go to work? She hardly listened. Her sorrow was too real, too wild and incoherent.