“Ach! you are already a United Stater yet,” declared the big woman, laughing. “Undt the friends you have it from Number Five Av’noo—yes?”
“You guessed it pretty near right,” cried Sadie. “Helen lives on Madison Avenyer—and it ain’t Madison Avenyer uptown, neither!”
She slipped her hand in Helen’s and bore her off to the tenement house in which Helen had had her first adventure in the great city.
“Come on up,” said Sadie, hospitably. “You look tired, and I bet you walked clear down here?”
“Yes, I did,” admitted Helen.
“Some o’ mommer’s soup mit lentils will rest you, I bet. It ain’t far yet—only two flights.”
Helen followed her cheerfully. But she wondered if she was doing just right in letting this friendly girl believe that she was just as poor as the Starkweathers thought she was. Yet, on the other hand, wouldn’t Sadie Goronsky have felt embarrassed and have been afraid to be her friend, if she knew that Helen Morrell was a very, very wealthy girl and had at her command what would seem to the Russian girl “untold wealth”?
“I’ll pay her for this,” thought Helen, with the first feeling of real happiness she had experienced since leaving the ranch. “She shall never be sorry that she was kind to me.”
So she followed Sadie into the humble home of the latter on the third floor of the tenement with a smiling face and real warmth at her heart. In Yiddish the downtown girl explained rapidly her acquaintance with “the Gentile.” But, as she had told Helen, Sadie’s mother had begun to break away from some of the traditions of her people. She was fast becoming “a United Stater,” too.
She was a handsome, beaming woman, and she was as generous-hearted as Sadie herself. The rooms were a little steamy, for Mrs. Goronsky had been doing the family wash that morning. But the table was set neatly and the food that came on was well prepared and—to Helen—much more acceptable than the dainties she had been having at Uncle Starkweather’s.