Mrs. Margolis shrugged her shoulders once more
I asked Lucy to try me in spelling. She did and I acquitted myself so well that she exclaimed: "Oh, you liar you! Why did you say you didn't know how to spell?"
Once more her mother took her to task for her manners
"Is that the vay to talk to a gentleman? Shame! Vere you lea'n up to be such a pig? Not by your mamma!"
When Max came back Lucy hastened to inform him that I could spell "awful good." To which he replied in Yiddish that he knew I was a smart fellow, that I could read and write "everything," and that I had studied to go to college and "to be a doctor, a lawyer, or anything."
His wife looked me over with bashful side-glances. "Really?" she said.
Max told me a lame story about his errand and promised to let me know the "final result." It was clearer than ever to me that he was making a fool of me.
CHAPTER III
WHEN I hear a new melody and it makes an appeal to me its effect usually lasts only as long as I hear it, but it is almost sure to reassert itself later on. I scarcely ever think of it during the first two, three, or four days, but then, all of a sudden, it will pop up in my brain and haunt me a few days in succession, humming itself and nagging me like a living thing.
This was precisely what happened to me with regard to Mrs. Margolis. During the first two days after I left her house I never gave her a thought, but on the third her shy side-glances suddenly loomed up in my mind and would not leave it. Just her black, serious eyes and those shy looks of theirs gleaming out of a white, strikingly interesting complexion. Her face in general was a mere blur in my memory