"What did I mean? What should I have meant? I meant what I said. _'F cou'se_ he knows many girls. But who does not? You know there are always girls in the shops where we work. Never fear, Jake has nothing to do with them." "Who says I fear! Did I say I did? Why should I?" Encouraged by the cheering effect which his words were obviously having on the credulous, unsophisticated woman, he pursued: "May no Jewish daughter have a worse husband. Be easy, be easy. I tell you he is melting away for you. He never looked as happy as he does since you came." "Go away! You must be making fun of me!" she said, beaming with delight. "Don't you believe me? Why, are you not a pretty young woman?" he remarked, with an oily look in his eye. The crimson came into her cheek, and she lowered her glance. "Stop making fun of me, I beg you," she said softly. "Is it true?" "Is what true? That you are a pretty young woman? Take a looking-glass and see for yourself." "Strange man that you are!" she returned, with confused deprecation. "I mean what you said before about Jake," she faltered. "Oh, about Jake! Then say so," he jested. "Really he loves you as life." "How do you know?" she queried, wistfully. "How do I know!" he repeated, with an amused smile. "As if one could not see!" "But he never told you himself!" "How do you know he did not? You have guessed wrongly, see! He did, lots of times," he concluded gravely, touched by the anxiety of the poor woman. She left Bernstein's room all thrilling with joy, and repentant for her excess of communicativeness. "A wife must not tell other people what happens to her husband," she lectured herself, in the best of humours. Still, the words "Your husband knows many nice _ladas_," kept echoing at the bottom of her soul, and in another few minutes she was at Mrs. Kavarsky's, confidentially describing Mamie's visit as well as her talk with the boarder, omitting nothing save the latter's compliments to her looks. Mrs. Kavarsky was an eccentric, scraggy little woman, with a vehement manner and no end of words and gesticulations. Her dry face was full of warts and surmounted by a chaotic mass of ringlets and curls of a faded brown. None too tidy about her person, and rather slattern in general appearance, she zealously kept up the over-scrupulous cleanliness for which the fame of her apartments reached far and wide. Her neighbours and townsfolk pronounced her crazy but "with a heart of diamond," that is to say, the diametrical opposite of the precious stone in point of hardness, and resembling it in the general sense of excellence of quality. She was neighbourly enough, and as she was the most prosperous and her establishment the best equipped in the whole tenement, many a woman would come to borrow some cooking utensil or other, or even a few dollars on rent day, which Mrs. Kavarsky always started by refusing in the most pointed terms, and almost always finished by granting.