And I knew that he lived somewhere in the same tenement as myself, but it was the first time I had the honor of seeing his wife.
"Look here," began the woman, "don't you work in the same shop as my husband?"
"Yes, yes," I said.
"Well, and now tell me," and the yellow-haired woman gave a bound like a hyena, "how is it I see you come home from work with all other respectable people, and my husband not? And it isn't the first time, either, that he's gone, goodness knows where, and come home two hours after everyone else. Where's he loitering about?"
"I don't know," I replied gravely.
The woman brandished her ladle in such a way that I began to think she meant murder.
"You don't know?" she exclaimed with a sinister flash in her eyes. "What do you mean by that? Don't you two leave the shop together? How can you help seeing what becomes of him?"
Then I remembered that when Manasseh and I left the shop, he walked with me a few blocks, and then went off in another direction, and that one day, when I asked him where he was going, he had replied, "To some friends."
"He must go to some friends," I said to the woman.
"To some friends?" she repeated, and burst into strange laughter. "Who? Whose? Ours? We're greeners, we are, we have no friends. What friends should he have, poor, miserable wretch?"