'Certainly she has money,' said his mother vindictively. 'She has thousands of _Gulden_ in her stocking. Twenty years ago she could have had her pick of a dozen well-to-do widowers, yet now that she has one foot in the grave, madness has entered her soul, and she has cast her eye upon this pauper.' 'But I thought his father left him his inn,' said the artist. 'His inn--yes. His sense--no. Yossel ruined himself long ago paying too much attention to the Talmud instead of his business. He was always a _Schlemihl_.' 'But can one pay too much attention to the Talmud? That is a strange saying for a Rabbi's daughter.' 'King Solomon tells us there is a time for everything,' returned the Rabbi's daughter. 'Yossel neglected what the wise King said, and so now he comes trying to wheedle your poor grandmother out of her money. If he wanted to marry, why didn't he marry before eighteen, as the Talmud prescribes?' 'He seems to do everything at the wrong time,' laughed her son. 'Do you suppose, by the way, that King Solomon made all his thousand marriages before he was eighteen?' 'Make not mock of holy things,' replied his mother angrily. The monetary explanation of the romance, he found, was the popular one in the village. It did not, however, exculpate the grandame from the charge of forwardness, since if she wished to contract another marriage it could have been arranged legitimately by the _Shadchan_, and then the poor marriage-broker, who got little enough to do in this God-forsaken village, might have made a few _Gulden_ out of it.