"He'll stay a week with us, perhaps more," she explained. "I want you to build him up. Fatten him up like a Passover goose. Do you hear?"
The servant, a tall, spare woman, with an extremely dark face tinged with blue, began by darting hostile glances at me
"Look at the way she is staring at him!" Shiphrah growled. "He is the son of the woman who was murdered at the Horse-market."
The old servant started. "Is he?" she said, aghast
"Are you pleased now? Will you take good care of him?"
"May the Uppermost give him a good appetite."
As Shiphrah led me from the kitchen into another room she said:
"She took a fancy to you. It will be all right."
She towed me into a vast sitting-room, so crowded with new furniture that it had the appearance of a furniture-store. There were many rooms in the apartment and they all produced a similar impression. I subsequently learned that the superabundance of sofas, chests of drawers, chairs, or bric-à-brac-stands was due to Shiphrah's passion for bargains, a weakness which made her the fair game of tradespeople and artisans. Several of her wardrobes and bureaus were packed full of all sorts of things for which she had no earthly use and many of which she had smuggled in when her husband and the children were out
Ensconced in a corner of an enormous green sofa in the big crowded sitting-room, with a book in her lap, we found a young woman with curly brown hair and sparkling brown eyes set in a small oval face. She looked no more than twenty, but when her mother addressed her as Matilda I knew that I was facing the heroine of the sensational divorce. She was singularly interesting, but pretty she certainly was not. Her Gentile name had a world of charm for my ear
One of the trifles that clung to my memory is the fact that upon seeing her I felt something like amazement at her girlish appearance. I had had a notion that a married woman, no matter how young, must have a married face, something quite distinct from the countenance of a maiden, while this married woman did not begin to look married.