"These children have only to go out into London and all will be given to them." Only the eldest girl listened to these conversations, and she used to hold her head high, and her face would go pale as ferociously she followed up the ideas they suggested to her. But Abramovich could bring no consolation. Jacob would not go back to the stick-polishing, and at last he could bear it no longer, went out and bought a clean collar, clipped his beard, and without a word of farewell, went to America. II POVERTY THEN followed, for Golda, the blackest years of her life. She removed once more to one room in Gun Street, and she and the two boys earned enough to keep body and soul together. She found work in other people's houses, helped at parties, and when nothing else was available she went to a little restaurant to assist as scullery-maid, and stayed after closing-time to scrub the tables and sweep the floor. For this she was given crusts of bread and scraps from the plates. She never had a word from her husband, and she knew she would not hear unless he made money. If he failed again, as of course he would, he would live in silence, solitary, proud, avoiding his fellow-men, who would have nothing to do with him except he made the surrender of dignity which it was impossible for him to make. She would not hear from him, and he would return one day unannounced, without a word, as though he had come from the next street; and as likely as not he would have given the coat off his back to some one poorer than himself. . . . Jacob was like that. He would give away on an impulse things that it had cost him weeks of saving to acquire. Low as he stood in the world, he seemed always to be looking downwards, as though he could believe in what came up from the depths but not in anything that went beyond him. Golda could not understand him, but she believed in him absolutely. She knew that he suffered even more than she, and she had learned from him not to complain. The Jews had always suffered. That was made clear in the synagogue, where, in wailing over the captivity in Babylon, Golda found a vent for her own sorrows. She would weep over the sufferings of her race as she wept for those who were dead, her father and her mother, and her father's father and her little brother, on the anniversary of their death. However poor she might be she had money to buy candles for them, and whatever the cost she kept the observances of her religion. So she lived isolated and proud, untouched by the excitements her children found in the houses of their friends and in the streets.