Perhaps she was not a writer, after all. Had the years and years of night-study been in vain? Choked with discouragement, the cry broke from her, “O--God--God help me! I feel--I see, but it all dies in me--dumb!” * * * * * Tedious days passed into weeks. Again Sophie sat staring into her notebook. “There’s nothing here that’s alive. Not a word yet says what’s in me ... “But it _is_ in me!” With clenched fist she smote her bosom. “It must be in me! I believe in it! I got to get it out--even if it tears my flesh in pieces--even if it kills me!... “But these words--these flat, dead words ... “Whether I can write or can’t write--I can’t stop writing. I can’t rest. I can’t breathe. There’s no peace, no running away for me on earth except in the struggle to give out what’s in me. The beat from my heart--the blood from my veins--must flow out into my words.” She returned to her unfinished essay, “Believe in Yourself.” Her mind groping--clutching at the misty incoherence that clouded her thoughts--she wrote on. “These sentences are yet only wood--lead; but I can’t help it--I’ll push on--on--I’ll not eat--I’ll not sleep--I’ll not move from this spot till I get it to say on the paper what I got in my heart!” Slowly the dead words seemed to begin to breathe. Her eyes brightened. Her cheeks flushed. Her very pencil trembled with the eager onrush of words. Then a sharp rap sounded on her door. With a gesture of irritation Sophie put down her pencil and looked into the burning, sunken eyes of her neighbor, Hanneh Breineh. “I got yourself a glass of tea, good friend. It ain’t much I got to give away, but it’s warm even if it’s nothing.” Sophie scowled. “You mustn’t bother yourself with me. I’m so busy--thanks.” “Don’t thank me yet so quick. I got no sugar.” Hanneh Breineh edged herself into the room confidingly. “At home, in Poland, I not only had sugar for tea--but even jelly--a jelly that would lift you up to heaven. I thought in America everything would be so plenty, I could drink the tea out from my sugar-bowl. But ach! Not in Poland did my children starve like in America!” Hanneh Breineh, in a friendly manner, settled herself on the sound end of the bed, and began her jeremiad. “Yosef, my man, ain’t no bread-giver. Already he got consumption the second year. One week he works and nine weeks he lays sick.” In despair Sophie gathered her papers, wondering how to get the woman out of her room. She glanced through the page she had written, but Hanneh Breineh, unconscious of her indifference, went right on. “How many times it is tearing the heart out from my body--should I take Yosef’s milk to give to the baby, or the baby’s milk to give to Yosef? If he was dead the pensions they give to widows would help feed my children. Now I got only the charities to help me. A black year on them! They should only have to feed their own children on what they give me.”