A cloud of gloom stared up at him out of his wife’s darkening eyes.
“Why are you still so black with worry?” he admonished. “If you would only trust yourself on God, all good would come to us yet.”
“On my enemies should fall the good that has come to us,” groaned Mrs. Ravinsky. “Better already death than to be helped again by the pity from kind people.”
“What difference how the help comes, so long we can keep up our souls to praise God for His mercy on us?”
Despair was in the look she fixed upon her husband’s lofty brow—a brow untouched by time or care, smooth, calm and seamless as a child’s. “No wonder people think that I’m your mother. The years make you younger. You got no blood in your body—no feelings in your heart. I got to close my eyes with shame to pass in the street the people what helped me, while you—you—shame cannot shame you—poverty cannot crush you——”
“Poverty? It stands in the Talmud that poverty is an ornament on a Jew like a red ribbon on a white horse. Those whom God chooses for His next world can’t have it good here.”
“Stop feeding me with the next world!” she flung at him in her exasperation. “Give me something on this world.”
“Wait only till our American daughter will grow up. That child has my head on her,” he boasted with a father’s pride. “Wait only, you’ll see the world will ring from her yet. With the Hebrew learning I gave her, she’ll shine out from all other American children.”
“But how will she be able to lift up her head with other people alike if you depend yourself on the charities?”
“Woman! Worry yourself not for our Rachel! It stands in the Holy Book, the world is a wheel, always turning. Those who are rich get poor; if not they, then their children or children’s children. And those who are poor like us, go up higher and higher. Our daughter will yet be so rich, she’ll give away money to the charities that helped us. Isaiah said——”