The conductor came up for their fares. Jake handed him a ten-cent piece, and raising two fingers, he roared out: "Two! He ain' no maur as tree years, de liddle feller!" And so great was the impression which his dashing manner and his English produced on Gitl, that for some time it relieved her mind and she even forgot to be shocked by the sight of her husband handling coin on the Sabbath. Having thus paraded himself before his wife, Jake all at once grew kindly disposed toward her. "You must be hungry?" he asked. "Not at all! Where do you eat your _varimess_?"[8] [8] Yiddish for dinner. "Don't say varimess," he corrected her complaisantly; "here it is called _dinner_!" "_Dinner?_[9] And what if one becomes fatter?" she confusedly ventured an irresistible pun. [9] Yiddish for thinner. This was the way in which Gitl came to receive her first lesson in the five or six score English words and phrases which the omnivorous Jewish jargon has absorbed in the Ghettos of English-speaking countries. CHAPTER V. A PATERFAMILIAS. It was early in the afternoon of Gitl's second Wednesday in the New World. Jake, Bernstein and Charley, their two boarders, were at work. Yosselé was sound asleep in the lodgers' double bed, in the smallest of the three tiny rooms which the family rented on the second floor of one of a row of brand-new tenement houses. Gitl was by herself in the little front room which served the quadruple purpose of kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and parlour. She wore a skirt and a loose jacket of white Russian calico, decorated with huge gay figures, and her dark hair was only half covered by a bandana of red and yellow. This was Gitl's compromise between her conscience and her husband. She panted to yield to Jake's demands completely, but could not nerve herself up to going about "in her own hair, like a Gentile woman." Even the expostulations of Mrs. Kavarsky--the childless middle-aged woman who occupied with her husband the three rooms across the narrow hallway--failed to prevail upon her. Nevertheless Jake, succumbing to Mrs. Kavarsky's annoying solicitations, had bought his wife a cheap high-crowned hat, utterly unfit to be worn over her voluminous wig, and even a corset. Gitl could not be coaxed into accompanying them to the store; but the eloquent neighbour had persuaded Jake that her presence at the transaction was not indispensable after all. "Leave it to me," she said; "I know what will become her and what won't. I'll get her a hat that will make a Fifth Avenue lady of her, and you shall see if she does not give in. If she is then not _satetzfiet_ to go with her own hair, _vell_!" What then would take place Mrs. Kavarsky left unsaid. The hat and the corset had been lying in the house now three days, and the neighbour's predictions had not yet come true, save for Gitl's prying once or twice into the pasteboard boxes in which those articles lay, otherwise unmolested, on the shelf over her bed.