"Yes?" asked Philip.
"I say, what about being pals?"
Philip blushed slightly. "Let's!" he said.
They walked down the playground with linked arms.
"Oh, yes!" accepted Philip innocently. "I do think Miss Tibbet is a narky bitch!"
"Carried nem-con!" exclaimed Sewelson, proud of his elegant introduction of a foreign tongue.
CHAPTER IV
The vicissitudes of school and Angel Street represented only the secular side of Philip's existence. The Jewish, the clerical side, claimed his servitude as soon as he pushed open the door of the house. The whole day, of course, was punctuated with greater or lesser ceremonies; but a considerable portion of it, at least of that part not taken up by school, was spent in his father's chayder. Beyond chayder, to gather together and confirm the saintliness ardently desired and pursued for him by his father, lay the synagogue in Doomington Road, the Polisher Shool.
The room in which the chayder was housed was distinctly dismal, despite the fountain of spiritual light playing perpetually there, the fountain whereof Reb Monash himself was the head. It lay between the "parlour," a chilly room upholstered in yellow plush, which was on the right as you passed into the "lobby," and the kitchen in the recesses of the house, to enter which you descended two invisible steps. Beyond the window of the chayder and beyond the yard, hung a grim, blank-windowed hat-and-cap factory.