“You can’t have Rockefeller’s palace for three dollars a month,” defended Hanneh Breineh, as she shoved one of the boxes under the legless corner of the cot. “If the bed ain’t so steady, so you got good neighbors. Upstairs lives Shprintzeh Gittle, the herring-woman. You can buy by her the biggest bargains in fish, a few days older.... What she got left over from the Sabbath, she sells to the neighbors cheap.... In the front lives Shmendrik, the shoemaker. I’ll tell you the truth, he ain’t no real shoemaker. He never yet made a pair of whole shoes in his life. He’s a learner from the old country--a tzadik, a saint; but every time he sees in the street a child with torn feet, he calls them in and patches them up. His own eating, the last bite from his mouth, he divides up with them.” “Three dollars,” deliberated Sophie, scarcely hearing Hanneh Breineh’s chatter. “I will never find anything cheaper. It has a door to lock and I can shut this woman out ... I’ll take it,” she said, handing her the money. Hanneh Breineh kissed the greasy bills gloatingly. “I’ll treat you like a mother! You’ll have it good by me like in your own home.” “Thanks--but I got no time to shmoos. I got to be alone to get my work done.” The rebuff could not penetrate Hanneh Breineh’s joy over the sudden possession of three dollars. “Long years on you! May we be to good luck to one another!” was Hanneh Breineh’s blessing as she closed the door. Alone in her room--_her_ room, securely hers--yet with the flash of triumph, a stab of bitterness. All that was hers--so wretched and so ugly! Had her eager spirit, eager to give and give, no claim to a bit of beauty--a shred of comfort? Perhaps her family was right in condemning her rashness. Was it worth while to give up the peace of home, the security of a regular job--suffer hunger, loneliness, and want--for what? For something she knew in her heart was beyond her reach. Would her writing ever amount to enough to vindicate the uprooting of her past? Would she ever become articulate enough to express beautifully what she saw and felt? What had she, after all, but a stifling, sweatshop experience, a meager, night-school education, and this wild, blind hunger to release the dumbness that choked her? Sophie spread her papers on the cot beside her. Resting her elbows on the potato barrel, she clutched her pencil with tense fingers. In the notebook before her were a hundred beginnings, essays, abstractions, outbursts of chaotic moods. She glanced through the titles: “Believe in Yourself,” “The Quest of the Ideal.” Meaningless tracings on the paper, her words seemed to her now--a restless spirit pawing at the air. The intensity of experience, the surge of emotion that had been hers when she wrote--where were they? The words had failed to catch the life-beat--had failed to register the passion she had poured into them.