"It is written on the paper," I faltered, "just two words."
He opened the paper and read out, "Your daughter!" His eyes rolled again. "What know you of my daughter?"
"Oh, I know all about her," I said airily.
"Then you know that my daughter does not receive pilgrims."
"Nay, 'tis I that wish to receive your daughter," I ventured jocosely, with a touch of levity I did not feel. He raised his clinched hand as if to strike me, and I had a lurid sense of three green eyes glaring at me. I stood my ground as coolly as possible, and said, in dry, formal tones, "I wish to make application for her hand."
A great blackness came over the frosted visage, as if his black biretta had been suddenly drawn forward, and his erst blanched eyebrows gloomed like a black lightning-cloud over the baleful eyes.
I shrank back, then I had a sudden vision of the wagons clattering down Broadway in a live, sunlit, go-ahead world, and the Wonder Rabbi turned into an absurd old parent with a beautiful daughter and a bad temper.
"I am a man of substance," I went on dryly. "In my country I have fat lands."
The horribleness of thus bidding for Bethulah flashed on me even as I spoke. To mix up a creature of mist and moonlight with substance and fat lands! Monstrous! And yet I knew that thus, and thus only, by honourable talk with her guardian, could a Zloczszol bride be won.
But the Wonder Rabbi sprang to his feet so vehemently that his high-backed chair rocked as in a gale.