"Well, one day I lost a boarder. He had his foot caught in a machine. They took him to the hospital at noon, and in the evening he was dead.
"It was too bad. He was a nice fellow. But I, who was I to mourn him? I paid sixteen dollars rent. So I put out a shingle the same day 'Boarders wanted.' On the next day I got a new boarder. I was not particular then. Especially when I saw a nice clean young man, with teeth as white as grains of polished rice; and a voice he had like silk, like pure silk, so soft and nice. He did not bargain, he did not talk. Five dollars a month, five dollars. I asked him what time he had to get up in the morning, because if he had to get up later than the other bedfellow, he should sleep near the wall, not to be disturbed, or if he had to get up earlier the other will sleep near the wall. He did not care. It was all fixed up and in the evening he brought his trunk. It was as heavy as stone—full of books.
"After supper my other boarders used to sit at a game of cards. Not that they were gamblers, but what else should they have done? They drank tea, soda water, a can of beer sometimes. Sometimes my Moritz sat with them for a while—just to make them feel at home. Believe me, I did not lose at them. They paid for tea and sugar. Why shouldn't they? Was I their mother? In America one has to pay for everything.
"But that new boarder I got, he wouldn't play cards and wouldn't drink beer. He sat in a corner and read books till late at night.
"Then after a few weeks the others, too, stopped playing cards. They all sat up late in the night and talked. The new boarder was explaining all the time how their bosses got richer every day. Every night the same thing. He was a Socialist.
"My husband was very busy, worked overtime, Sundays, whole nights. It was already fourteen years that he worked for Kuntzman, and we had put aside a nice little sum of money.
"One evening my Moritz came home very angry. Kuntzman had engaged a new foreman, an Italian fellow, and the two of them, my husband and he, couldn't agree. After supper, I told him to go to sleep, but he did not want to. He went in to talk with the boarders. I went to bed. Late at night Moritz came in.
"'You sleep,' he said.
"'What is it?'
"'You know, that new boarder is perfectly right in what he says about bosses!' Moritz said to me.