She left Bernstein’s room all thrilling with joy, and repentant for her excess of communicativeness. “A wife must not tell other people what happens to her husband,” she lectured herself, in the best of humours. Still, the words “Your husband knows many nice ladas,” kept echoing at the bottom of her soul, and in another few minutes she was at Mrs. Kavarsky’s, confidentially describing Mamie’s visit as well as her talk with the boarder, omitting nothing save the latter’s compliments to her looks.
Mrs. Kavarsky was an eccentric, scraggy little woman, with a vehement manner and no end of words and gesticulations. Her dry face was full of warts and surmounted by a chaotic mass of ringlets and curls of a faded brown. None too tidy about her person, and rather slattern in general appearance, she zealously kept up the over-scrupulous cleanliness for which the fame of her apartments reached far and wide. Her neighbours and townsfolk pronounced her crazy but “with a heart of diamond,” that is to say, the diametrical opposite of the precious stone in point of hardness, and resembling it in the general sense of excellence of quality. She was neighbourly enough, and as she was the most prosperous and her establishment the best equipped in the whole tenement, many a woman would come to borrow some cooking utensil or other, or even a few dollars on rent day, which Mrs. Kavarsky always started by refusing in the most pointed terms, and almost always finished by granting.
She started to listen to Gitl’s report with a fierce mien which gradually thawed into a sage smile. When the young neighbour had rested her case, she first nodded her head, as who should say, “What fools this young generation be!” and then burst out:
“Do you know what I have to tell you? Guess!”
Gitl thought Heaven knows what revelations awaited her.
“That you are a lump of horse and a greenhorn and nothing else!” (Gitl felt much relieved.) “That piece of ugliness should try and come to my house! Then she would know the price of a pound of evil. I should open the door and—march to eighty black years! Let her go to where she came from! America is not Russia, thanked be the Lord of the world. Here one must only know how to handle a husband. Here a husband must remember ‘ladas foist’—but then you do not even know what that means!” she exclaimed, with a despairing wave of her hand.
“What does it mean?” Gitl inquired, pensively.
“What does it mean? What should it mean? It means but too well, never min’. It means that when a husband does not behabe as he should, one does not stroke his cheeks for it. A prohibition upon me if one does. If the wife is no greenhorn she gets him shoved into the oven, over there, across the river.”
“You mean they send him to prison?”
“Where else—to the theatre?” Mrs. Kavarsky mocked her furiously.