“I got yourself a glass of tea, good friend. It ain’t much I got to give away, but it’s warm even if it’s nothing.”
Sophie scowled. “You mustn’t bother yourself with me. I’m so busy—thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet so quick. I got no sugar.” Hanneh Breineh edged herself into the room confidingly. “At home, in Poland, I not only had sugar for tea—but even jelly—a jelly that would lift you up to heaven. I thought in America everything would be so plenty, I could drink the tea out from my sugar-bowl. But ach! Not in Poland did my children starve like in America!”
Hanneh Breineh, in a friendly manner, settled herself on the sound end of the bed, and began her jeremiad.
“Yosef, my man, ain’t no bread-giver. Already he got consumption the second year. One week he works and nine weeks he lays sick.”
In despair Sophie gathered her papers, wondering how to get the woman out of her room. She glanced through the page she had written, but Hanneh Breineh, unconscious of her indifference, went right on.
“How many times it is tearing the heart out from my body—should I take Yosef’s milk to give to the baby, or the baby’s milk to give to Yosef? If he was dead the pensions they give to widows would help feed my children. Now I got only the charities to help me. A black year on them! They should only have to feed their own children on what they give me.”
Resolved not to listen to the intruder, Sophie debated within herself: “Should I call my essay ‘Believe in Yourself,’ or wouldn’t it be stronger to say, ‘Trust Yourself’? But if I say, ‘Trust Yourself,’ wouldn’t they think that I got the words from Emerson?”
Hanneh Breineh’s voice went on, but it sounded to Sophie like a faint buzzing from afar. “Gotteniu! How much did it cost me my life to go and swear myself that my little Fannie—only skin and bones—that she is already fourteen! How it chokes me the tears every morning when I got to wake her and push her out to the shop when her eyes are yet shutting themselves with sleep!”
Sophie glanced at her wrist-watch as it ticked away the precious minutes. She must get rid of the woman! Had she not left her own sister, sacrificed all comfort, all association, for solitude and its golden possibilities? For the first time in her life she had the chance to be by herself and think. And now, the thoughts which a moment ago had seemed like a flock of fluttering birds had come so close—and this woman with her sordid wailing had scattered them.