"You mean the other way around: you would ride in my carriage and I should have to start a breach-of-promise case against 'Dr. Levinsky.' You'll have to look for a bigger fool than I," she concluded, with a smile
It was an attractive smile, full of good nature and common sense. A smile of this kind often makes a homely face pretty. Gussie's did not. The light it shed only served to publish her ugliness. But I did not care. The infatuation I had brought with me from Antomir had not yet completely faded out, anyhow. And so I harbored vague thoughts that some day, when I saw fit to press my suit, Gussie might yield
I was getting impatient. The idea of having to go back to work became more hateful to me every day. I was in despair. Finally I decided to consider my career as a cloak-maker closed; to cut my expenses to the veriest minimum, to live on my savings, look for some source of income that would not interfere with my studies, take the college examination as soon as I was ready for it, and let the future take care of itself
In the heart of the Jewish neighborhood I found an attic for half of what I was paying the Irish family. Moreover, it was a neighborhood where everything was cheaper than in any other part of New York, the only one in which it was possible for a man to have a "room" to himself and live on four dollars a week. So I moved to that attic, a step for which, as I now think of it, I cannot but be thankful to fate, for it brought me in touch with a quaint, simple man who is my warm friend to this day, perhaps the dearest friend I have had in America
The house was a rickety, two-story frame structure, the smallest and oldest-looking on the block. Its ground floor was used as a tailoring shop by the landlord himself, a white-headed giant of a man whom I cannot recall otherwise than as smiling wistfully and sighing. His name was Esrah Nodelman. His wife, who was a dwarf beside him, ruled him with an iron hand
Mrs. Nodelman gave me breakfasts, and I soon felt like one of the family.
She was a veritable chatter-box, her great topic of conversation being her son Meyer, upon whom she doted, and his American-born wife, whose name she scarcely ever uttered without a malediction. She told me how she, Meyer's mother, her sister, and a niece had turned out their pockets and pawned their jewelry to help Meyer start in business as a clothing-manufacturer
"He's now worth a hundred thousand dollars—may no evil eye hit him," she said. "He's a good fellow, a lump of gold. If God had given him a better wife (may the plague carry off the one he has) he would be all right. She has a meat-ball for a face, the face of a murderess. She always was a murderess, but since Meyer became a manufacturer there is no talking to her at all. The airs she is giving herself! And all because she was born in America, the frog that she is."
I soon made Meyer's acquaintance. He was a dark man of forty, with Oriental sadness in his eyes. To lend his face capitalistic dignity he had recently grown a pair of side-whiskers, but one day, a week or two after I met him, he saw a circus poster of "Jo Jo, the human dog," and then he hastened to discard them
"I don't want to look like a man-dog," he explained, gaily, to his mother, who was unpleasantly surprised by the change.