“You will not take them! Why?”
“I don't know—I can't!”
“I know!” he cried angrily, but with a certain dignity. “It is because I am a Jew. Not because I am a tailor—you have too much sense for that—but because I am a Jew!”
“Oh, Mr. Cohen!”
“Yes—I know—I see inside of you. I read you just as if you were a page in a book. Who taught you to think that? Not your Uncle Peter; he loves me—I love him. Who taught you such nonsense?” His voice had risen with every sentence. In his indignation he looked twice his size. “Is not my money as good as that man Breen's—who insults you when you go to him?—and who laughed at you? Have I laughed at you? Does Mr. Grayson laugh?”
Jack tried to interrupt, but the tailor's words poured on.
“And now let me tell you one thing more, Mr. John Breen. I do not give you the bonds. I give them to Mr. Grayson. Never once has he insulted me as you do now. All these years—fifteen years this winter—he has been my friend. And now when the boy whom he loves wants some money for a friend, and Mr. Grayson has none to give him, and I, who am Mr. Grayson's friend, come to help that boy out of his trouble, you—you—remember, you who have nothing to do with it—you turn up your nose and stop it all. Are you not ashamed of yourself?”
Jack's eyes blazed. He was not accustomed to be spoken to in that way by anybody; certainly not by a tailor.
“Then give them to Uncle Peter,” Jack flung back. “See what he will say.”
“No, I will not give them to your Uncle Peter. It will spoil everything with me if he knows about it. He always does things for me behind my back. He never lets me know. Now I shall do something for him behind his back and not let him know.”