"Else you could run away and be Two Little Vagabonds!" he suggested.
"Don't want to run away! He'd swank like one o'clock, the pig!" Philip said morosely. "Besides," he added in a slightly altered tone, "don't want to run away from mother! She'd be lonely! Oh, Harry, you're no help to a chap, you aren't!"
Yet the conversation was not wholly fruitless. It implanted in Philip the germ of more than one idea.
"Rebbie," said Mottele at dinner one Saturday afternoon, "my uncle, peace-be-upon-him, died on Thursday, no? I want to go and join the minyon at my auntie's house to-night."
"What good art thou at a minyon? Thou canst not make a tenth! Thou art in years still far from thy thirteenth year."
"But all the same it's a mitzvah?"
"Ah, true, true!" said Reb Monash, his eye full of benignant appreciation. "Go thou then. Thou art no big one and they will make room for thee. Bring thou in the best bread thou hast forgotten, Chayah," he said turning to his wife.
She rose and entered the parlour where Reb Monash kept the "best bread" locked in the sideboard. She placed the bread dutifully before her husband. It had latterly become the custom for Mottele to join the Massel family for dinner on the Sabbath mid-day. Reb Monash felt that his punctilious washing before meals, his prayers before food and his evident appreciation of the long blessing after food, could have nothing but the most exemplary effect upon Philip.
Philip writhed inwardly to find Reb Monash cut a couple of slices of the "best bread" (so dignified because the flour was of a slightly superior brand and was varnished and sprinkled with black grain), one for Mottele and one for himself. The "second bread" lay at the other end of the table for the consumption of his mother, of Channah and, of course, of Philip. The treatment meted out respectively to Mottele and himself in chayder had inured him to indignity. This seemed, however, an unnecessary slight upon his mother, even if she was only a woman and therefore somewhat beyond the pale of masculine courtesies.
"As for thee, Feivel," said Reb Monash, "after dinner thou wilt stay indoors to say over to thyself the week's portion, while I take my few minutes' sleep. It was badly said by thee in chayder on Thursday evening. Thou didst halt three times, four times. When wilt thou learn to say it like Mottele? It was like a stream running, Chayah, the way Mottele said it, so clear, oh, a pleasure!"