He would leave the employers triumphantly, his eyes beaming with happiness, as if he had just won a significant victory; with his glance, as he passed along the street, he would transfix every heavy paunched Jew who looked like an employer of labour. And his brain teemed with cutting remarks that he should have used and which he would be sure to employ in the very next encounter with those exploiters, those bloodsuckers, those cannibals. He saw himself surrounded by a host of toilers who raised their eyes to him as their guardian and defender. His breast swelled with pride and self-confidence and he was contented with himself.... “Jilted again!” was his jocular greeting to his landlady, a thin old woman, as he entered the house. She looked at him in surprise. “From what gallows has he escaped in broad daylight?” she queried to herself. “Fired again?” she scolded loudly, eyeing him with scorn. “The Lord protect us, what a man you are!” She shook her head, as if she had long ago decided that he was a hopeless case; he was a good-for-nothing in the first place and a good-for-nothing he would remain. She turned away with a depreciatory curl of her lips. The wrinkles on her face, which was as dry and yellow as parchment, became even deeper. “I gave them a bawling-out, all right!” he chuckled, while his eyes sparkled with joy. “Much satisfaction that is!” replied the old woman, sarcastically. “They must have taken it terribly to heart! Upon my word!” “Such exploiters,—vampires,—cannibals. The world isn’t enough for them!” he continued, unmindful of her words. “Do you think I’m going to be afraid of them? What? Do you imagine we’re going to let them fatten on our sweat and blood, and look on in silence? Bah! Not a bit of it! I refuse to be silent! Such exploiters, cut-purses! I refuse to be silent!...” “Psh! As bold as a Cossack!” she ridiculed. “But what satisfaction did you get? It was _you_ who was chased out! You, with your ‘sploiters’ and your ‘poiters’!...” She was angry with the word, which she did not understand. She even thought that if it had not been for that word Drabkin would not have come to sorrow. She was ready to spit contemptuously upon the floor and leave him. But Drabkin seized upon her last words. “Chased out? Not so quick, my dear! They don’t chase _me_ out in a hurry!” “They’re afraid of you, I suppose!” she snarled. “I wouldn’t let you cross my threshold!” “Well, you see that they do!” he boasted. “Wild man!” she commented in disgust. “Aha!” was his victorious response. After that “aha” the old woman spoke no more. She spat out in scorn, adjusted the scarf over her wig and walked away from him. “‘Sploiters, poiters.’” She continued to repeat the evil word to herself with anger. II But he was vied in an utterly different light by Chashke, the old woman’s daughter. When she returned at evening from work—she was a dressmaker—her mother met her with this greeting: “He’s sitting around idle again.”