"Beautiful!" said the daughter. "And mamma, only think, she's quicker than Leah, already. I timed them."
"I muz call your vader, dough," said the Jewess, and she disappeared through the doorway.
While I stood talking to the younger Jewess, who had, I could see, formed as quick an attachment for me as I for her, I heard another nasal and guttural voice (a man's) coming towards us from the hall.
"Is she von of our people?"
"Nein! She's a Skihoah"—meaning, as I afterwards learned, a non-Jewish girl.
Then a tall, thin Jew entered the room behind the elderly Jewess. I had never before and have never since seen such a patriarchal figure. With his long grey beard and solemn face he might have stood for Moses in one of the pictures that used to hang on the walls of the convent—except for his velvet skull-cap and the black alpaca apron, which was speckled over with fluffy bits of thread and scraps of cloth and silk.
He looked at me for a moment with his keen eyes, and after his wife had shown him my work, and he had taken a pinch of snuff and blown his nose on a coloured handkerchief with the sound of a trumpet, he put me through another catechism.
I was trembling lest he should make intimate inquiries, but beyond asking my name, and whether I was a Christian, he did not concern himself with personal questions.
"Vat vages do you vant?" he asked.
I told him I should be pleased to take whatever was paid to other girls doing work of the same kind.