“What is good or bad?” I challenged. “All I know is that I was hungry and you fed me. Shelterless and you sheltered me. Broken in spirit and you made me whole——”
“That stuff’s all right, but you’re better off out of here.”
I started towards her in mute protest.
“Don’t touch me,” she cried. “Can’t you see—the smut all over me? Ain’t it in my face?”
Her voice broke. And like one possessed of sudden fury, she seized me by the shoulder and shoved me out.
As the door slammed I heard sobbing—loosened torrents of woe. I sank to my knees. A light not of this earth poured through the door that had shut on me. A holiness enveloped me.
This woman had changed the world for me. I could love the people I had hated yesterday. There was that something new in me, a light that the dingiest rooming house could not dim nor all the tyranny of the landlady shut out.
Vague, half remembered words flashed before me in letters of fire. “Despised and rejected of men: a woman of sorrows acquainted with grief.”
DREAMS AND DOLLARS
Spring was in the air. But such radiant, joyous spring as one coming out of the dark shadows of the ghetto never could dream. Earth and sky seemed to sing with the joy of an unceasing holiday. Rebecca Yudelson felt as though she had suddenly stepped into fairyland, where the shadow of sorrow or sickness, where the black blight of poverty had never been.