"Thank you. Do come. Will you?" I shook my head
"Will you never come?" she asked, playfully. "Never? Never?"
"I have told you you're a charming girl, haven't I? What more do you want?"
The American children of the Ghetto are American not only in their language, tastes, and ambitions, but in outward appearance as well. Their bearing, gestures, the play of their features, and something in the very expression of their Semitic faces proclaim the land of their birth. All this was true of Lucy. She was fascinatingly American, and I told her so
"You're not simply a charming girl. You're a charming American girl," I said.
I wondered whether Dora had been keeping up her studies, and by questioning Lucy about the books under her arm I contrived to elicit the information that her mother had read not only such works as the Vicar of Wakefield, Washington Irving's Sketch Book, and Lamb's Shakespeare Stories, which had been part of Lucy's course during her first year at college, but that she had also read some of the works of Cooper, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and all sorts of cheaper novels
"Mother is a great reader," Lucy said. "She reads more than I do. Why, she reads newspapers and magazines—everything she can lay her hands on! Father calls her Professor."
She also told me that her mother had read a good deal of poetry, that she knew the "Ancient Mariner" and "The Raven" by heart
"She's always at me because I don't care for poetry as much as she does," she laughed.
"Well, you're not taller than your mother in this respect, are you?"