He made to rush after them, but checked himself to wait till the treife[10] food was served them. A few minutes later he made his entry, cool and collected as a regular customer.
Each of the two young men was bent on a veal cutlet. The collegian was dispatching his with the nonchalant appetite and ease of manner of an habitué, whereas poor Shaya looked like one affecting to relish his first plate of raw oysters. The smells proceeding from the kitchen made him dizzy, and the cutlet itself, partly because he was accustomed to meat of a better quality, but mainly through the consciousness of eating treife, inclined him to nausea.
Asriel took a vacant chair at the same table.
"Bless the sitter,[11] Shaya!" he said.
The two young men were petrified.
"How is the pork—does it taste well?" Asriel pursued.
"It is not pork. It is veal cutlet," the teacher found tongue to retort.
"I am not speaking to you, am I?" Asriel hissed out. Murder was swelling in his heart. But at this point the waiter came up to his side.
"Vot'll ye have?"
"Notink!" Asriel replied, suddenly rising from his seat and rushing out, as if this were the most terrible sort of violence he could conceive.