“God damn him.” “Jim, you have no mind and you have no heart. You don’t learn at all, Jim. Why instead of swearing at Abe Mangel don’t you see him straight? God hasn’t damned him. God’s damned us perhaps ... by spreading him and the likes of him all over the world: or blessed us. I don’t know, Jim. But _he’s_ not damned.” “O look here, Fanny. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Even Susan don’t, either, half the time. None of us. But we like you fine just the same. Now, it ain’t because Mangel’s a Jew that I can’t go him. You’re wrong there, Fanny. I know lots of Jews. Lots of my pals is Jews. Mark Pfennig’s one, for instance. All the gamblers ... half the gunmen ... the best of the bulls ... the sharpest of the lawyers....” “But Mangel’s different----?” “Yes! His doddering old big-nosed face bowing into the room. His softy grey hands weaving inside each other. His flat feet that don’t make a squeak.” “Is he square?” “O he’s square, all right.... So far. He’s shrewd. He can be hard and smart, believe me! It ain’t that, Fanny.” “A lot you know what it is? It’s because he’s a Jew, I tell you.” “It ain’t. I got lots of friends----“ “Jim, I don’t think anybody can be a Jew, just because his name happens to be Cohn or Levy.” “Fanny ... you’re crazy!” * * * * * One twilight Fanny had them clear.... More and more they came to Clara’s flat. Evening ‘parties’ were frequent. Afternoons, Tessie and Susan often called for Fanny, and took her for a walk or to a show. It was Spring. The City lay beneath the Sun’s lubricity. The dirt in the hard streets was fecund. The sparrows and the robins daubed the warming world with their swift flashes of life. It was Spring. And Fanny moved, somnambulant, through a strange ease spread for her by hands forever less strange. --You ... and you ... and you: now I see you clear. These men and women were no accident. They had words now she understood. They had wills now--here was the wonder of her life--that touched her own. Not Harry’s will had touched hers. Not her child’s, to eat her’s up. Not Christopher Johns’. And Leon’s ... Leon’s will had stood beyond her, over the ken of her horizons. These wills touched hers!--these wills of women disgraced, of men criminal and broken, outlawed and dissolute. --I have two hands, and upon each of them five fingers. My sickness, the harsh four years since Jonathan, have wasted my flesh. Yet it is somehow sweet. My hair is not the verdant hedge it was, it is a little stringy, a little limp. But still black. My eyes have fire at times. I am thirty-five ... and I am real, Fanny Luve! They felt that she felt them clear. Clara above all. The women above all. Her feeling them clear at last was a bridge to them. Their will, long champing on the brink of their division, moved on her own. Already they had spoken of details of their dream to Mark Pfennig, to Statt, to Mangel. “We will take a House. And you will take care of us, Fanny!”