The eldest boy flung all his ardour into dancing, and was the champion slow waltzer of the neighbourhood. With egg-shells on his heels to show that he never brought them to the ground, he could keep it up for hours and won many prizes. Harry scorned this polite prowess. For him the romance of the streets was irresistible: easy amorous conquests, battles of tongues and fists, visits to the prize-ring, upon which his young ambition centred. A bout between a Jew and a Christian would lead to a free-fight in the audience, for the Jews yelled in Yiddish to their champion, and the British would suspect insults to them or vile instructions, and would try to enforce silence . . . And Harry would bring gruff young men to the house, youths with puffy eyes and swollen or crooked or broken noses, and he would treat them with an enthusiastic deference which found no echo in any member of the family save Mendel, who found the world opened up to him by Harry large and adventurous, like the open sea stretching away and away from the whirlpool. There was one extraordinarily nice man whom Harry brought to the house. His name was Kuit, and he had failed as a boxer and had become a thief, a trade in which he was an expert. His talk fascinated Mendel, and indeed the whole family. None could fail to listen when he told of his adventures and his skill. He had begun as a pickpocket, plying his trade in Bishopsgate or the Mile End Road, and to show his expertise he would run his hands over Jacob's pockets without his feeling it, and tell him what they contained. Or he would ask Golda to let him see her purse, and she would grope for it only to find that he had already taken it. He had advanced from picking pockets to the higher forms of theft: plundering hotels or dogging diamond merchants, and he was keenly interested in America. It was through him that the family knew the little that was ever revealed to them of Jacob's doings there. Kuit said he would go to America and not return until he had ten thousand pounds, all made by honest theft, for he would only rob the rich, and, indeed, he was most generous with his earnings, and gave Golda many handsome pieces of jewellery, and he lent Jacob money when he badly needed it. That, however, was not Jacob's reason for admitting Kuit to his family circle. He liked the man, was fascinated by him, and thought his morals were his own affair. He knew his race and the poor too well to be squeamish, and never dreamed of extending his authority beyond his family. He warned Harry that if he took to Kuit's practices he would no longer be a son of his, and as the accounts of prison given to Harry by some of his acquaintances were not cheering, Harry preferred not to run any risks. Instead, he devoted himself to training for the glory of the prize-ring.