The second year would have been worse except for the lucky chance which secured him the agency for some Russian newspapers and considerably increased his income. If he had not so stubbornly refused to have anything to do with Yiddish, the store might have become prosperous, for he gradually learned the business and grew to use some judgment in replenishing his stock. His quaint philosophy attracted a little group of admirers. Even if they did not entirely accept his dreams, they liked to hear him talk about them.
In this environment Yetta grew into girlhood. Every day when her school work was finished she read aloud to her father from the books he had placed on the reserved shelf. It was a planless mixture—a History of the Jews, Motley and Prescott, Shakespeare and Dickens and Emerson.
The last thing she read to him was a three-volume edition of Les Miserables. She was fifteen then, and her reading was frequently interrupted by his coughs. Perhaps he had caught it from the lad who was racing with death to graduate from the Encyclopedia. Benjamin's friends shook their heads mournfully. But he expected to recover soon; was he not taking his "patent medicine" regularly? And so to the wonderful symphony of Hugo's masterpiece Benjamin coughed out his life. The third volume was read, not in the little store, but in their bedroom in the Goldstein's flat. It was the last book Yetta read for several years. When it was finished, she had begun to be afraid; she did not have the courage to begin a new book. He was too sick to listen.
CHAPTER II YETTA'S GIRLHOOD
The death of her father was a greater catastrophe to Yetta than she realized. She felt only the personal loss. Her uncle took care of the financial matters, sold the book-store, and so forth. When the funeral expenses were paid, he said there was nothing left. Coming back from the cemetery, her aunt, in as kindly a manner as was possible to so woe-begone and soured a woman, tried to explain to her what it meant to be penniless. Leave school? Go to work? She hardly listened. Her sorrow was too real, too wild and incoherent.
The Goldsteins had three children. Isaac was eighteen. Two years before he had graduated from the House of Refuge—a pickpocket of parts. He had his ups and downs, but on the whole he found money "easy," and hardly a week passed when he did not hand his mother a few dollars.
The twin daughters of sixteen were working and brought their wages home. Rosa was anæmic, querulous, and unattractive. She worked "bei buttonholes." A slight curvature of the spine, which had become apparent in her childhood, had developed into a pitiful deformity after the years bent over a machine. Rachel had monopolized all the charms of health and good spirits which should have been divided between them. Her face looked much younger than Rosa's, but her body had developed into a pleasing womanhood which had been entirely denied her sister. She was not beautiful, but she was red blooded, merry, and likable. She was a milliner and earned twice as much as Rosa.