He was a strange child and very slow in growing into a boy. The other children had seemed to shoot into independence almost as soon as they could walk. But Mendel clung to her, would not learn to feed himself, and would not go to sleep at night unless she sang to him and rocked him in the cradle, in which he slept even after he went to school. As long as he could curl up in it he slept in his cradle, and he made her learn as much as she could of an English song which had caught his fancy. It was the only English song she ever knew, and night after night she had to sing it over and over again as she rocked the heavy cradle:-- Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do; I'm half crazy, all for the love of you. She had no idea what the words meant, but the boy loved the tune and her funny accent and intonation, and even when she was ill and tired she would sing him to sleep, and then sit brooding over him with her fingers just touching his curly hair. And in her complete absorption in his odd, unchildlike childhood she was perfectly content, and entirely indifferent to all that happened outside him. Brutal things, terrible things happened, but they never touched the child, and if she could, she hid the knowledge of them from him. Abramovich collected a little capital and persuaded Mr. Kühler to join him in a furrier's business. They were not altogether unsuccessful, and Mr. Kühler took a whole house in Gun Street and bought a piano, but soon their capital was exhausted and they had given more credit than they were accorded and the business trickled through their fingers. Mr. Kühler took to his bed, for he could sleep at will and almost indefinitely, and so could avoid seeing poverty once more creeping up like a muddy sea round his wife and children. It had been bad enough when that happened at home, where at the worst there were his relations to help, and there were the potato fields to be despoiled, and, at least, the children could be happy playing in the roads or by the river, or on the sides of the mountain. But here in London poverty was black indeed, and there was no one but Abramovich to help, and he was in almost as bad case as himself. Yet astonishingly Abramovich came again and again to the rescue. He was a little squat, ugly man, the stunted product of some obscure Russian ghetto, and he seemed to live by and for his enthusiasm for the Kühler family. In their presence he glowed, greedily drank in every word that Jacob or Golda said, and was always loud in his praises of the beautiful children. . . . "The sky is dark now," he used to say, "but they will be rich, and they will give you horses and carriages, and Turkey carpets, and footmen, and flowers in the winter, and they will bring English gentlemen to the house and what you want, that you shall have. . . ." "I want nothing," Jacob would say. "I want nothing. I will work and be my own master. I will not steal or help other men to steal." "You wait," Abramovich would reply.