She broke into a fit of sobbing, but checked it, shook my hand vehemently and hastened away.
[note: Yom Kippur] Day of Atonement; figuratively, a day of anguish and tears.
CHAPTER XIX
I HOPED she would yield, but she did not. I found myself in the grip of an iron will and I did as I was bidden
When I set out in quest of a furnished room I instinctively betook myself to the neighborhood of Stuyvesant Park. That park had acquired a melancholy fascination for me. As though to make amends for my agonies, I determined to move into a good, spacious room, even if I had to pay three or four times as much as I had been paying at the Margolises'. I found a sunny front room with two windows in an old brown-stone house on East Nineteenth Street, between Second Avenue and First, a short distance from the little park and near an Elevated station. The curtains, the carpet, the huge, soft arm-chair, and the lounge struck me as decidedly "aristocratic." To cap the climax of comfort and "swellness," the landlady—a gray little German-American—had, at my request, a bookcase placed between the mantelpiece and one of the windows. It was a "regular" bookcase, doors and all, not a mere "what-not," and the sight of it swelled my breast
"I shall forget all my troubles here," I thought. "I am going to buy a complete set of Spencer and some other books. Won't the bookcase look fine! I shall read, read, read."
When I reported to Dora that I was ready to move, her face clouded
"You seem to be glad to," she said, with venom, dropping her eyes
"Glad? Glad? Why, I am not going to move, then. May I stay here, darling mine? May I?"
"Are you really sorry you have to move?" she asked, fixing a loving glance at me. "Do you really love me?"