Frau Schneemann laid her hand on his mouth.
'Heaven forbid the omen,' she cried. ''Tis bringing a Bilbul (scandal) upon a respectable family.'
'I will go and talk to her,' he said gravely. 'Indeed, I ought to have gone to see her days ago.' And as he trudged to the other end of the village towards the cottage where the lively old lady lived in self-sufficient solitude, he was full of the contrast between his mother's mental world and his own. People live in their own minds, and not in streets or fields, he philosophized.
II
Through her diamond-paned window he saw the wrinkled, white-capped old creature spinning peacefully at the rustic chimney-corner, a pure cloistral crone. It seemed profane to connect such a figure with flirtation—this was surely the very virgin of senility. What a fine picture she made too! Why had he never thought of painting her? Yes, such a picture of 'The Spinster' would be distinctly interesting. And he would put in the Kesubah, the marriage certificate that hung over the mantelpiece, in ironical reminder of her days of bloom. He unlatched the door—he had never been used to knock at grannie's door, and the childish instinct came back to him.
'Guten Abend,' he said.
She adjusted a pair of horn spectacles, and peered at him.
'Guten Abend,' she murmured.
'You don't remember me—Vroomkely.' He used the old childish diminutive of Abraham, though he had almost forgotten he owned the name in full.
'Vroomkely,' she gasped, almost overturning her wheel as she sprang to hug him in her skinny arms. He had a painful sense that she had shrunk back almost to childish dimensions. Her hands seemed trembling as much with decay as with emotion. She hastened to produce from the well-known cupboard home-made Kuchen and other dainties of his youth, with no sense of the tragedy that lay in his no longer being tempted by them.