When the doctor came down after his lecture, Yetta asked if she could be of any help in the sick-room.
"No," he replied shortly. "You'd only use up good air."
She had never felt so useless before in her life. The next few days passed—in dread. Most of the time she spent at the office. She had taken on Isadore's editorial work. There was some comfort in that. His other tasks had been divided between Locke and Moore and Levine. A big strike broke out in the Allied Building Trades; it meant extra work—but also increased circulation. After the day's grind, Yetta came back to the hushed home where the great battle was being fought out and where she was perforce a non-combatant.
There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask the doctor, but he was generally too busy to talk. One night after Isadore had been sick more than a week Liebovitz came down from a lecture in a genial mood.
"I hope your aunt has cooked a big supper," he said. "Nothing to eat at home. The good wife is house cleaning."
"Well. How's it going?" Yetta asked, as he came out of the sick-room and sat down to a plate of steaming noodle-soup.
"We've done our part. It's up to him now. We've pulled him through the regular crisis. If he don't take it into his head to relapse and if he really wants to get well, I guess he will."
He answered her questions in monosyllables until he had stowed away the last of Mrs. Goldstein's cooking. Then, lighting a cigarette and putting three lumps of sugar in his coffee, he began joking with the old woman in Yiddish. But Yetta kept interrupting him with more questions.
"You want to know what I think?" he said, turning to her severely. "Well, listen. I think Isadore will get well. I hope so. It wouldn't do any good to have him die. None of you people would read the lesson. But he don't deserve to. For ten years he's been violating all the rules of health regularly. You're all intelligent enough to understand some of Nature's laws, but you're too utterly light-minded to obey them! Isadore started out with a wonderful constitution and now is so run-down that an insignificant little typhoid germ gets into his mouth and nearly kills him. Good God. You all want to blame the germ. But they can't do any harm unless you're already sick—made yourself sick, as Isadore has. I'm not afraid of them—my business takes me right where they live. I'm as hard as nails. And you ought to see my kids. They're as sound as I am."