"You can depend on father to find some defense for mother," remarked the picturesque Emil
At her husband's suggestion and after some urging the hostess led the way back to the parlor, or library, where she was to play us something. As we were passing out of the dining-room and up the stairs Tevkin seized the opportunity to say to me: "We live on the communistic principle, as you see. Each of us, except Mrs.
Tevkin and the little one contributes his earnings or part of them to the general treasury, my wife acting as treasurer and manager. Still, in the near future I hope to be able to turn the commune into a family of the good old type. My affairs are making headway, thank God. I sha'n't need my children's contributions much longer."
Mrs. Tevkin played some classical pieces. She had a pleasing tone and apparently felt at home at the keyboard, but it was to my eye rather than to my ear that her playing appealed. A white-haired Jewish woman at a piano was something which, in Antomir, had been associated in my mind with the life of the highest aristocracy exclusively. But then Mrs. Tevkin's father had been a physician, and Jewish physicians belonged, in the conception of my childhood and youth, to the highest social level. Another mark of her noble birth, according to my Antomir ideas, was the fact that she often addressed her husband and her older children, not in Yiddish or English, but in Russian. Compared to her, Matilda's mother was a plebeian
The only other person in the family who played the piano with facility and confidence was Emil.
I had never been in a house of this kind in my life. I was fascinated beyond expression
Anna's constraint soon wore off and she treated me with charming hospitality. So did Elsie. There was absolutely no difference in their manner toward me. Elsie gave me the attention which a girl usually accords to a close friend of her father's, and this was also the sort of attention I received from her older sister. It was as if the Catskill episode had never taken place and she were now seeing me for the first time
I met Moissey and his wife at my next visit. He was a man of thirty-two or more, tall, wiry, nervous, with large, protruding, dark eyes. He was "a dentist by profession and a Russian social democrat by religion," as his father introduced him to me
"Karl Marx is his god and Pleenanoff, the Russian socialist leader, is his Moses," the old man added
Moissey's wife looked strikingly Semitic. She seemed to have just stepped out of the Old Testament. She had been only about a year in the country, and the only language she could speak was Russian, which she enunciated without a trace of a Jewish accent or intonation. She scarcely understood Yiddish.