"The loveliest flower," he repeated; "and so you will come, won't you?—you and your friend Aaronleben—pardon me for calling him that; for how can I call him Adolf, when I often had him in my arms when he was a little child, and his mother, Chane, was my own sister's daughter? You'll come now, and prevent the people in Barnow saying of the old Marschallik—'He's only fit to invite common Jews, the uneducated folk of the town; he's no good at all where young gentlemen are concerned!'"
I could not help laughing. "All right," I said, "make your mind easy as regards me. But whether Adolf will go or not is a different question; I don't think he will. However, you'd better come back to-morrow and hear what he says."
The little man once more raised his hands in the air, bowing low at the same time; after which, he trotted out of the room with a broad smile upon his face.
I was convinced that I should have to go alone. And, indeed, when I told Adolf of the invitation, he answered testily: "Say no more. I'll follow you to hell if you like, but not to these people!"
"What a pity!" I said. "It would have been such a good opportunity for you to have made an interesting study of the character of—our hostess, Frau Sprinze Klein. You don't know her. She was born at Brzezan, and is now a very rich widow. She keeps a haberdasher's shop."
"Very interesting," he replied, scornfully.
"More so than you imagine. A very grave psychological process is going on in that woman. She is struggling with all her might to free herself from the oppressive bonds of orthodoxy, and to gain a more enlarged view of life; but it must be confessed that her efforts to attain this end are very comical, to say the least of it. Frau Klein lives like every other Jewess. She does not venture to wear her own hair, and can not bring herself to disobey the Levitical laws regarding food in the smallest particular. But as she once spent six months in Lemberg when she was a girl, she has a sort of Platonic love for 'culture' and 'enlightenment.' She begins nearly every sentence with, 'When I was in Lemberg.' She shows her Platonic love of enlightenment in strange ways. For instance, she delights in speaking High-German, and whenever she manages to pick up a foreign word, she continually drags it into her conversation by hook or by crook for the next week. You may easily imagine how the unfortunate foreign word suffers at her hands; or rather, I should say, you can't imagine it, for it far exceeds the bounds of the wildest imagination. Here is another example: Frau Sprinze can't read a word of German, and yet she bought three second-hand books at a sale—these are, Schiller's 'Robbers,' a story by Caroline Pichler, and a volume of 'Casanova.' She is in the habit of keeping one of these books lying open before her on the counter, and whenever she thinks that any one is looking at her, she stares at the mysterious characters printed on the page as attentively as though she understood what they meant. If any pious Jew tells her that reading a German book is a deadly sin, she invariably answers: 'When I was in Lemberg, I noticed that the daughters of the chief rabbi were in the habit of reading German books.' At the same she secretly comforts herself by the thought: 'If reading these books is really a sin, I am innocent of committing it....' As a last example of her large-mindedness, we have the invitation to her daughter's marriage-feast. You must know that she has arranged that the dancing at her party shall not be conducted after the 'Jewish fashion'—the men with men and the women with women—but after that of the Christians, which allows men and women to dance with each other. We probably owe the heartiness of our invitation to the fact that very few of the young men who are to be there know how to dance properly."
"How flattering!"
"Pooh! What does that matter? It'll be capital fun, I expect! Even if they only have slow country-dances, I think that the chance of having such a pretty girl as Esterka Regina as a partner would make up for anything. Don't you?"
"No, I don't," answered Adolf, shortly.