I felt reassured, but I was lonely. I was yearning for some congenial company, and blamed fate for having allowed Miss Tevkin to make another engagement—if she had
The veranda was crowded and almost as noisy as the dining-room had been.
There was a hubbub of broken English, the gibberish being mostly spoken with self-confidence and ease. Indeed, many of these people had some difficulty in speaking their native tongue. Bad English replete with literal translations from untranslatable Yiddish idioms had become their natural speech. The younger parents, however, more susceptible of the influence of their children, spoke purer English.
It was a dark night, but the sky was full of stars, full of golden mystery.
The mountains rose black, vast, disquieting. A tumultuous choir of invisible katydids was reciting an interminable poem on an unpoetic subject that had something to do with Miss Tevkin. The air was even richer in aroma than it had been in the morning, but its breath seemed to be part of the uncanny stridulation of the katydids. The windows of the dancing-pavilion beyond the level part of the lawn gleamed like so many sheets of yellow fire. Presently its door flew open, sending a slanting shaft of light over the grass
I found a chair on the veranda, but I was restless, and the chatter of two women in front of me grated on my nerves. I wondered where Miss Tevkin and her companion were at this minute. I was saying to myself that I would never come near them again, that I was going to see Fanny; but I did not cease wondering where they were. The two women in front of me were discussing the relative virtues and faults of little boys and little girls. They agreed that a boy was a "big loafer" and a great source of trouble, and that a little girl was more obedient and clinging. It appeared that one of these two mothers had a boy and two girls and that, contrary to her own wish, he was her great pet, although he was not the "baby."
"I am just crazy for him," she said, plaintively
She boasted of his baseball record, whereupon she used the slang of the game with so much authority that it became entertaining, but by a curious association of ideas she turned the conversation to the subject of a family who owed the hotel-keeper their last summer's board and who had been accepted this time in the hope that they would pay their old debt as well as their new bills
Two men to the right of me were complaining of the unions and the walking delegates, of traveling salesmen, of buyers. Then they took up the subject of charity, whereupon one of them enlarged on "scientific philanthropy," apparently for the sheer lust of hearing himself use the term
I recalled that one of the things I was booked to do in Tannersville was to attend a charity meeting of East Side business men, of which Kaplan was one of the organizers. Two subscriptions were to be started—one for a home for aged immigrants and one for the victims of the anti-Jewish riots in Russia—and I was expected to contribute sums large enough to do credit to my prospective father-in-law