again. "My mother, may her merits protect us, was a good woman, and my father could not forget her. Well, a woman alone in the house! My father, peace be upon him, had no time to spare—he was away nearly the whole week in the villages—he traded in all sorts of things, whatever you please—eggs, butter, rags, hogs' bristles, linen." "And you?" "I sat in the house-of-study and learned. Well, I reflected, a woman gets frightened all by herself; but why cry? No, she said, she was dull. Dull? What was that? "I saw that she went about like one half asleep. Sometimes she did not hear when spoken to, or she seemed absent-minded, and sat staring at the wall—stared and stared—or else, her lips moved and never a sound to be heard. But as to being dull—all a woman's fancy. An unaccountable folk, women! A Jew, a man, is never dull. A Jew has no time to be dull, a Jew is either hungry or full; either he has business on hand, or he is in the house-of-study, or asleep; if one has heaps of time one smokes a pipe; but dull!—--" "Remember," I put in, "a woman has no Torah, no Kohol affairs, no six hundred and thirteen religious obligations." "That's just where it is! I soon came to the conclusion that being dull meant having nothing to do—a sort of emptiness calculated to drive one mad. Our sages saw that long ago. Do you know the saying, 'Idleness leads the mind to wander?' According to the law, no woman may be idle. I said to her: Do something! She said, she wanted to 'read'! "'To read,' sounded very queer to me, too. I knew that people who know how to write call 'learning' lehavdîl, reading books and newspapers, but I did not know then that she was so learned.... She spoke less to me than I to her. She was a tall woman; but she kept her head down and her lips closed as though she could not count two. She was quiet altogether—quiet as a lamb; and there was always a look in her face as if a whole ship full of sour milk had foundered at sea. She wanted to read, she said. And what? Polish, German, even Yiddish—anything to read. "In all Konskivòlye there wasn't a book to be found. I was very sorry—I couldn't refuse her. I told her I would get her some books when I went to see my relative in Lublin. "'And you have nothing?' she asked. "'I? Preserve us!' "'But what do you do all day