“Dot's all right,” Mr. Blum replied. “I know how it is myself. I was pretty near to being a traimp myself, one time, already. Hey, Rebecca?”
“Du bist ein Engel—ja wohl!—ein himmlischer, wunderschoener Engel!” cried his wife, her broad face beaming like a harvest moon. Then she whispered to Elias, “Ach! He is so loafly, dot Meester Blum!” and kept swaying her head, and smiling to herself, for the next ten minutes.
With the coffee, the gentlemen lighted their cigars, and, leaving their respective places, gathered in a knot at one end of the table, where they began vociferously to exchange their views upon the state of trade. The ladies assembled at the other end, and discoursed of topics maternal and domestic. Lester was produced, and trotted upon his grandmother's lap, while his “points” were mooted and admired for the thousandth time. Finally, the men again covered their heads; and the rabbi chanted his grace after meat. Then Mr. Koch proposed that the company should ascend to the parlor, and listen to some music. In the parlor the gentlemen lighted fresh cigars; and Miss Tillie seated herself at the piano.
She played the second Hungarian Rhapsody, and the Allegro Appassionato from the Moonlight Sonata, and Chopin's Funeral March, and she played them all marvelously well. Her technic was exact and brilliant; her feeling was ardent, intelligent and refined. For an hour she flooded the room with bewitching harmonies, and held every heart there spellbound. Elias, whose chief sentiment for her, a short while ago, had been one of half contemptuous amusement, felt an emotion very like genuine respect begin to stir within his bosom. It astonished him, it awed him a little, to find that a young lady who, in the commoner relations of life, appeared so crude and so prosaic, was possessed of such superb and consummate genius for a noble art. “There must be something in her, after all,” he thought. She, perhaps, divined what was going on in his mind; for, when he had finished complimenting her upon her performance, she said, in a subdued voice, and with a gentler air than her usual one, “I know, Mr. Bacharach, that I'm not very much in conversation; but when I sit down at the piano, it seems as though somehow I was another girl, and a great deal nicer one; and I feel things that I don't ever feel anywhere else. I guess maybe music's my natural method of expression.”
“Now, Mr. Bacharach,” Mr. Koch said, when Elias and the rabbi were taking their leave, “don't treat us like strangers. Drop in on us any evening, or to dinner any Sunday afternoon. We'll always be glad to see you.”
“Yes; come over often,” added Mrs. Koch. “Come just exactly as if you was to home.”
XVII.
ELIAS had enjoyed his dinner at the Kochs' very much. He had been greatly amused by it; but he had derived from it, besides, a pleasure that was deeper than mere amusement—the pleasure, namely, which comes of contact with people whom we feel to be thoroughly good and wholesome.