But it won't be to-morrow. Look at them well, because another day you will not find them so merry, they will not seem like the same.
One of the likely lads has left his place, and suddenly appeared at a table beside a pretty, curly-haired girl. He has hurried over his Matzes, and now he wants to help her.
She thanks him for his attention with a rolling-pin over the fingers, and there is such laughter among the spectators that Berke, the old overseer, exclaims, "What impertinence!"
But he cannot finish, because he has to laugh himself. There is a spark in the embers of his being which the girlish merriment around him kindles anew.
And the other lads are jealous of the beaten one. They know very well that no girl would hit a complete stranger, and that the blow only meant, "Impudent boy, why need the world know of anything between us?"
Shloimehle Shieber, armed with the shovels, stands still for a minute trying to distinguish Sossye's voice in the peals of laughter. The Matzes under his care are browning in the oven.
And Sossye takes it into her head to make her Matzes with one pointed corner, so that he may perhaps know them for hers, and laughs to herself as she does so.
There is one table to the side of the room which was not there last year; it was placed there for the formerly well-to-do housemistresses, who last year, when they came to bake their Matzes, gave Yom-tov money to the others. Here all goes on quietly; the laughter of the merry people breaks against the silence, and is swallowed up.
The work grows continually pleasanter and more animated. The riddler stamps two or three Matzes with hieroglyphs at once, in order to show off. Shloimeh at the oven cannot keep pace with him, and grows angry:
"May all bad...."