“Ach!” she sighed. “How good it is to forget your troubles, and only those that’s got troubles have the chance to forget them!” She sipped the grape-juice leisurely, thrilled into ecstacy with each lingering drop. “How it laughs yet in me, the life, the minute I turn my head from my worries!” With growing wonder in her eyes, Sophie watched Hanneh Breineh. This ragged wreck of a woman--how passionately she clung to every atom of life! Hungrily, she burned through the depths of every experience. How she flared against wrongs--and how every tiny spark of pleasure blazed into joy! Within a half-hour this woman had touched the whole range of human emotions, from bitterest agony to dancing joy. The terrible despair at the onrush of her starving children when she cried out, “O that I should only bury you all in one day!” And now the leaping light of the words: “How it laughs yet in me, the life, the minute I turn my head from my worries.” “Ach, if I could only write like Hanneh Breineh talks!” thought Sophie. “Her words dance with a thousand colors. Like a rainbow it flows from her lips.” Sentences from her own essays marched before her, stiff and wooden. How clumsy, how unreal, were her most labored phrases compared to Hanneh Breineh’s spontaneity. Fascinated, she listened to Hanneh Breineh, drinking her words as a thirst-perishing man drinks water. Every bubbling phrase filled her with a drunken rapture to create. “Up till now I was only trying to write from my head. It wasn’t real--it wasn’t life. Hanneh Breineh is real. Hanneh Breineh is life.” “Ach! What do the rich people got but dried-up dollars? Pfui on them and their money!” Hanneh Breineh held up her glass to be refilled. “Let me only win a fortune on the lotteree and move myself in my own bought house. Let me only have my first hundred dollars in the bank and I’ll lift up my head like a person and tell the charities to eat their own cornmeal. I’ll get myself an automobile like the kind rich ladies and ride up to their houses on Fifth Avenue and feed them only once on the eating they like so good for me and my children.” With a smile of benediction Shmendrik refilled the glasses and cut for each of his guests another slice of cake. Then came the handful of nuts and raisins. As the children were scurrying about for hammers and iron lasts with which to crack their nuts, the basement door creaked. Unannounced, a woman entered--the “friendly visitor” of the charities. Her look of awful amazement swept the group of merrymakers. “Mr. Shmendrik!--Hanneh Breineh!” Indignation seethed in her voice. “What’s this? A feast--a birthday?” Gasps--bewildered glances--a struggle for utterance! “I came to make my monthly visit--evidently I’m not needed.” Shmendrik faced the accusing eyes of the “friendly visitor.” “Holiday eating ...” “Oh--I’m glad you’re so prosperous.”