The six o’clock whistles still reverberated when Sam Arkin hurried down the factory stairs and out to the corner where he was to meet Shenah Pessah. He cleared his throat to greet her as she came, but all he managed was a bashful grin. She was so near, so real, and he had so much to say--if he only knew how to begin. He cracked his knuckles and bit his finger-tips, but no words came. “Ach! You yok! Why ain’t you saying something?” He wrestled with his shyness in vain. The tense silence remained unbroken till they reached her house. “I’m sorry”--Shenah Pessah colored apologetically--“But I got no place to invite you. My room is hardly big enough for a push-in of one person.” “What say you to a bite of eating with me?” he blurted. She thought of her scant supper upstairs and would have responded eagerly, but glancing down at her clothes, she hesitated. “Could I go dressed like this in a restaurant?” “You look grander plain, like you are, than those twisted up with style. I’ll take you to the swellest restaurant on Grand Street and be proud with you!” She flushed with pleasure. “Nu, come on, then. It’s good to have a friend that knows himself on what’s in you and not what’s on you, but still, when I go to a place, I like to be dressed like a person so I can feel like a person.” “You’ll yet live to wear diamonds that will shine up the street when you pass!” he cried. Through streets growing black with swarming crowds of toil-released workers they made their way. Sam Arkin’s thick hand rested with a lightness new to him upon the little arm tucked under his. The haggling pushcart peddlers, the newsboys screaming, “Tageblatt, Abendblatt, Herold,” the roaring noises of the elevated trains resounded the pæan of joy swelling his heart. “America was good to me, but I never guessed how good till now.” The words were out before he knew it. “Tell me only, what pulled you to this country?” “What pulls anybody here? The hope for the better. People who got it good in the old world don’t hunger for the new.” A mist filled her eyes at memory of her native village. “How I suffered in Savel. I never had enough to eat. I never had shoes on my feet. I had to go barefoot even in the freezing winter. But still I love it. I was born there. I love the houses and the straw roofs, the mud streets, the cows, the chickens and the goats. My heart always hurts me for what is no more.” The brilliant lights of Levy’s Café brought her back to Grand Street. “Here is it.” He led her in and over to a corner table. “Chopped herring and onions for two,” he ordered with a flourish. “Ain’t there some American eating on the card?” interposed Shenah Pessah. He laughed indulgently. “If I lived in America for a hundred years I couldn’t get used to the American eating. What can make the mouth so water like the taste and the smell from herring and onions?”