"I saw that she went about like one half asleep. Sometimes she did not hear when spoken to, or she seemed absent-minded, and sat staring at the wall--stared and stared--or else, her lips moved and never a sound to be heard. But as to being dull--all a woman's fancy. An unaccountable folk, women! A Jew, a man, is never dull. A Jew has no time to be dull, a Jew is either hungry or full; either he has business on hand, or he is in the house-of-study, or asleep; if one has _heaps_ of time one smokes a pipe; but dull!----" "Remember," I put in, "a woman has no Torah, no Kohol affairs, no six hundred and thirteen religious obligations." "That's just where it is! I soon came to the conclusion that being dull meant having nothing to do--a sort of emptiness calculated to drive one mad. Our sages saw that long ago. Do you know the saying, 'Idleness leads the mind to wander?' According to the law, no woman may be idle. I said to her: Do something! She said, she wanted to 'read'! "'To read,' sounded very queer to me, too. I knew that people who know how to write call 'learning' lehavdîl, reading books and newspapers, but I did _not_ know then that she was so learned.... She spoke less to me than I to her. She was a tall woman; but she kept her head down and her lips closed as though she could not count two. She was quiet altogether--quiet as a lamb; and there was always a look in her face as if a whole ship full of sour milk had foundered at sea. She wanted to read, she said. And what? Polish, German, even Yiddish--anything to read. "In all Konskivòlye there wasn't a book to be found. I was very sorry--I couldn't refuse her. I told her I would get her some books when I went to see my relative in Lublin. "'And _you_ have nothing?' she asked. "'_I?_ Preserve us!' "'But what do you do all day in the house-of-study?' "'I learn.' "'I want to learn, too,' says she. "I explained to her that the Gemoreh is not a story-book, that it is not meant for women, that it had been said women should not study it, that it is Hebrew.... "I gave her to understand that if the Konskivòlye people heard of such a thing, they would stone me, and quite right, too! I won't keep you in suspense, but tell you at once that she begged so hard of me, cried, fainted, made such a to-do that she had her way. I sat down every evening and translated a page of the Gemoreh for her benefit; but I knew what the end of it would be." "And what was it?" "You need not ask. I translated a page about goring oxen, ditches, setting on fire,[4] commentaries and all. I held forth, and she went to sleep over it night after night. That sort of thing was not intended for women. By good fortune, however, it happened that, during the great gale that blew that year, a certain book-peddler wandered out of his way into Konskivòlye, and I brought her home forty pounds' weight of story-books. Now it was the other way about--_she_ read to _me_, and--_I_ went to sleep.