Not all the allurements of my dream were sufficient to reconcile me to such a dangerous separation.
"It's impossible," I thought. "Quite impossible."
Insensibly my rapid footsteps slackened. When I reached that part of the Mile End Road in which the Jewish tailors live, and found myself listening to a foreign language which I afterwards knew to be Yiddish, and looking at men with curls at each side of their sallow faces, slithering along as if they were wearing eastern slippers without heels, I stopped, without knowing why, at the corner of a street where an Italian organ-man was playing while a number of bright-eyed Jewish children danced.
I was still looking on, hardly thinking of what I saw, when my eyes fell on an advertisement, pasted on the window of a sausage-and-ham shop at the corner. In large written characters it ran:
Seamstress Wanted. Good Wages.
Apply No. —— Washington Street.
How little are the things on which our destiny seems to hang! In a moment I was remembering what Mrs. Oliver had said about my being a good seamstress; and, almost before I knew what I was about, I was hurrying up the side street and knocking with my knuckles at an open door.
A rather fat and elderly Jewess, covered with rings and gold chains, and wearing a manifest black wig, came from a room at one side of the lobby. I explained my errand, and after she had looked me over in a sort of surprise, as if I had not been the kind of person she expected, she said, in a nasal and guttural voice:
"Vait! My daughter, she speaks very vell Ainglish."
Then turning her head over her shoulder, she pitched her voice several octaves higher and cried, "Miriam," whereupon there came tripping downstairs a Jewish girl of about eighteen, with large black eyes, thick black hair, and such a dear good face.
I repeated my application, and after the girl had interpreted my request to her mother, I was asked into the lobby, and put through a kind of catechism.