Love and hate tore at Rebecca’s heart—love of Minnie and hatred of the fleshpots that were destroying her sister. The days and nights of journey home were spent in tortured groping for the light. Ach—sisters! Flesh of one flesh, blood of one blood, aching to help one another in the loneliness of life, yet doomed like strangers to meet only to part again.
If she could only talk out her confusion to someone. Felix Weinberg! How he could make her clear! And suddenly she knew—knew with burning certainty that after ten years of worshipping him at a distance she must come to him face to face. Truth itself was driving her to him.
As she got off the train, her feet instinctively led her to the cellar café on East Broadway, where far into the morning hours Felix Weinberg and his high-thinking friends were to be found.
Even before she caught sight of him at a corner table surrounded by his followers, she felt a vast release. She looked in through the grated window. How different these—her own people—from the dollar-chasers she had just left! The dirt, the very squalor of the place was life to her, as the arrogant cleanliness, the strutting shirt-fronts of cloaks and suits had deadened her. Here rags talked high thoughts and world philosophies, like princes at a royal court. Here only what was in your heart and head counted, not your bank account or the shine of your diamonds.
Even the torn wall-plaster in this palace of dreams had a magic all its own. The pictures, the poems, the fragmentary bits of self-expression that were scribbled everywhere were marks of the vivid life that surged about—clamouring to be heard.
She never knew how she got inside, but as in a dream she heard herself talking to him—looking straight into Felix’s eyes in a miraculously natural way as though her whole life was but a leading up to this grand moment.
The youth who used to light up their little kitchen with his flaming presence was gone. In his place had come a man grown strong with suffering. Fine as silk and strong as steel shone every feature. He was scarred with all the hurts of the world—hurts that lay like whip lashes on the furrows of his face. She felt nothing would be too small or too big for him to understand.
“Years ago when I was only that big at your feet,” Rebecca measured the table height with her hand, “your words were life to me. Now I come three thousand miles to talk my heart out with you.” And she told him everything, her doubt of herself, her hard intolerance of the plain bread-and-butter people, her revolt against her own flesh and blood.
His face lit with quick comprehension. He stopped sipping his glass of tea and leaned towards her across the table. With every word, with every gesture she revealed herself as one of his own kind! This girl of whose existence he had scarcely been aware all these years seemed suddenly to have grown up under his very eyes, and he had not seen her till now.
“Don’t you see, little heart,” he responded warmly, “the dollars are their dreams. They eat the fleshpots with the same passionate intensity that they once fasted in faith on the Day of Atonement. They’ve been hungry for so many centuries. Let them eat! Give them only a chance for a few generations. They’ll find their souls again. The deeper down under the surface you get, the more you see that the dollar-chasers are also pursuing a dream, but their dream is different from ours, that is all.”