It was several months after Yetta's refusal before he reopened the subject. He did it by a letter—so worded that it required no reply. He would not bother her, he wrote, with repeated urgings. He could not see the use of pleading. They were grown up, too serious-minded to act such a comedy. But he wanted her to know that he was steadfast. If in the future her regard for him grew into the love he hungered for, he trusted that she would tell him. And so the matter rested.
Other suitors sprang up a-plenty, and their noisy importunity made Yetta very thankful to Isadore for his dignified reserve.
CHAPTER XXI THE STAR
The second summer after Walter had left, a desperate and successful strike of the cloak-makers brought Yetta's name once more into the papers. Mrs. Karner used the opportunity to open a new line of work to Yetta.
Mr. Karner owned The Star—the "yellowest" paper in the city. It was not only vulgar to the edge of obscenity, it was notoriously corrupt in politics. Being a one-cent paper, it of course posed as a "friend of the working-man," but it stood—unless the other side had collected an unusually large campaign fund—for Tammany Hall and the traction interests.
One morning at breakfast—while the cloak-makers' strike was a "live" news item—Mr. Karner spoke enviously of a woman who gave sentimental advice to love-lorn damsels on the magazine page of his keenest rival.
"I wish I could find some counter attraction," he said. "Our circulation among working girls is pitiful."
"Why don't you try Yetta Rayefsky?" Mrs. Karner suggested. "All the East Side girls know her. Do you happen to be advocating trade-unions this month?"