'Perhaps they are betrothed.'
'We betrothed to Yossel! May his name be blotted out!'
'Why, what is wrong with Yossel? Moses Mendelssohn himself had a hump.'
'Who speaks of humps? Have you forgotten we are of Rabbinic family?'
Her son had quite forgotten it, as he had forgotten so much of this naïve life to which he was paying a holiday visit.
'Ah yes,' he murmured. 'But Yossel is pious—surely?' A vision of the psalm-droners and prayer-shriekers in the little synagogue, among whom the hunchback had been conspicuous, surged up vividly.
'He may shake himself from dawn-service to night-service, he will never shake off his father, the innkeeper,' said Frau Schneemann hotly. 'If I were in your grandmother's place I would be weaving my shroud, not thinking of young men.'
'But she's thinking of old men, you said.'
'Compared with her he is young—she is eighty-four, he is only seventy-five.'
'Well, they won't be married long,' he laughed.