“Good-evenin’, Mamie!” Jake returned, jumping to his feet and violently reddening, as if suddenly pricked. “Mish Fein, my vife! My vife, Mish Fein!”
Miss Fein made a stately bow, primly biting her lip as she did so. Gitl, with the pot in her hands, stood staring sheepishly, at a loss what to do.
“Say ‘I’m glyad to meech you,’” Jake urged her, confusedly.
The English phrase was more than Gitl could venture to echo.
“She is still green,” Jake apologized for her, in Yiddish.
“Never min’, she will soon oysgreen herself,” Mamie remarked, with patronizing affability.
“The lada is an acquaintance of mine,” Jake explained bashfully, his hand feeling the few days’ growth of beard on his chin.
Gitl instinctively scented an enemy in the visitor, and eyed her with an uneasy gaze. Nevertheless she mustered a hospitable air, and drawing up the rocking chair, she said, with shamefaced cordiality: “Sit down; why should you be standing? You may be seated for the same money.”
In the conversation which followed Mamie did most of the talking. With a nervous volubility often broken by an irrelevant giggle, and violently rocking with her chair, she expatiated on the charms of America, prophesying that her hostess would bless the day of her arrival on its soil, and went off in ecstasies over Joey. She spoke with an overdone American accent in the dialect of the Polish Jews, affectedly Germanized and profusely interspersed with English, so that Gitl, whose mother tongue was Lithuanian Yiddish, could scarcely catch the meaning of one half of her flood of garrulity. And as she thus rattled on, she now examined the room, now surveyed Gitl from head to foot, now fixed her with a look of studied sarcasm, followed by a side glance at Jake, which seemed to say, “Woe to you, what a rag of a wife yours is!” Whenever Gitl ventured a timid remark, Mamie would nod assent with dignified amiability, and thereupon imitate a smile, broad yet fleeting, which she had seen performed by some uptown ladies.
Jake stared at the lamp with a faint simper, scarcely following the caller’s words. His head swam with embarrassment. The consciousness of Gitl’s unattractive appearance made him sick with shame and vexation, and his eyes carefully avoided her bandana, as a culprit schoolboy does the evidence of his offence.