“My name?” She fell back, dumbstruck. “Yes--you--everything I only got--you--” he mumbled. “I’ll give you dove’s milk to drink--silks and diamonds to wear--you’ll hold all my money.” She was shaken by this supreme proof of his devotion. “But I--I can’t--I got to work myself up for a person. I got a head. I got ideas. I can catch on to the Americans quicker’n lightning.” “My money can buy you everything. I’ll buy you teachers. I’ll buy you a piano. I’ll make you for a lady. Right away you can stop from work.” He leaned toward her, his eyes welling with tears of earnestness. “Take your hard-earned money? Could I be such a beggerin?” “God from the world! You are dearer to me than the eyes from my head! I’d give the blood from under my nails for you! I want only to work for you--to live for you--to die for you--” He was spent with the surge of his emotion. Ach! To be loved as Sam Arkin loved! She covered her eyes, but it only pressed upon her the more. Home, husband, babies, a bread-giver for life! And the Other--a dream--a madness that burns you up alive. “You might as well want to marry yourself to the President of America as to want him. But I can’t help it. _Him and him only_ I want.” She looked up again. “No--no!” she cried, cruel in the self-absorption of youth and ambition. “You can’t make me for a person. It’s not only that I got to go up higher, but I got to push myself up by myself, by my own strength--” “Nu, nu,” he sobbed. “I’ll not bother you with me--only give you my everything. My bank-book is more than my flesh and blood--only take it, to do what you want with it.” Her eyes deepened with humility. “I know your goodness--but there’s something like a wall around me--him in my heart.” “Him?” The word hurled itself at him like a bomb-shell. He went white with pain. And even she, immersed in her own thoughts, lowered her head before the dumb suffering on his face. She felt she owed it to him to tell him. “I wanted to talk myself out to you about him yet before.--He ain’t just a man. He is all that I want to be and am not yet. He is the hunger of me for the life that ain’t just eating and sleeping and slaving for bread.” She pushed back her chair and rose abruptly. “I can’t be inside walls when I talk of him. I need the earth, the whole free sky to breathe when I think of him. Come out in the air.” They walked for a time before either spoke. Sam Arkin followed where she led through the crooked labyrinth of streets. The sight of the young mothers with their nursing infants pressed to their bared bosoms stabbed anew his hurt. Shenah Pessah, blind to all but the vision that obsessed her, talked on. “All that my mother and father and my mother’s mother and father ever wanted to be is in him. This fire in me, it’s not just the hunger of a woman for a man--it’s the hunger of all my people back of me, from all ages, for light, for the life higher!”