“A lot you know what it is? It’s because he’s a Jew, I tell you.”
“It ain’t. I got lots of friends——“
“Jim, I don’t think anybody can be a Jew, just because his name happens to be Cohn or Levy.”
“Fanny ... you’re crazy!”
* * *
One twilight Fanny had them clear....
More and more they came to Clara’s flat. Evening ‘parties’ were frequent. Afternoons, Tessie and Susan often called for Fanny, and took her for a walk or to a show. It was Spring. The City lay beneath the Sun’s lubricity. The dirt in the hard streets was fecund. The sparrows and the robins daubed the warming world with their swift flashes of life. It was Spring. And Fanny moved, somnambulant, through a strange ease spread for her by hands forever less strange.
—You ... and you ... and you: now I see you clear.
These men and women were no accident. They had words now she understood. They had wills now—here was the wonder of her life—that touched her own. Not Harry’s will had touched hers. Not her child’s, to eat her’s up. Not Christopher Johns’. And Leon’s ... Leon’s will had stood beyond her, over the ken of her horizons.
These wills touched hers!—these wills of women disgraced, of men criminal and broken, outlawed and dissolute.