“In God’s name, don’t leave me!” she longed to cry out. “You are the only bit of light that I ever had, and now it will be darker and emptier for my eyes than ever before!” But no voice could rise out of her parched lips. She felt a faintness stunning her senses as though some one had cut open the arteries of her wrists and all the blood rushed out of her body.

“Oi weh!” she moaned. “Then it was all nothing to him. Why did he make bitter to me the little sweetness that was dearer to me than my life? What means he a gentleman?

“Why did he make me to shame telling me he didn’t mean nothing? Is it because I’m not a lady alike to him? Is a gentleman only a make-believe man?”

With a defiant resolve she seized hold of herself and rose to her feet. “Show him what’s in you. If it takes a year, or a million years, you got to show him you’re a person. From now on, you got why to live. You got to work not with the strength of one body and one brain, but with the strength of a million bodies and a million brains. By day and by night, you got to push, push yourself up till you get to him and can look him in his face eye to eye.”

Spent by the fervor of this new exaltation, she sat with her head in her hands in a dull stupor. Little by little the darkness cleared from her soul and a wistful serenity crept over her. She raised her face toward the solitary ray of sunlight that stole into her basement room.

“After all, he done for you more than you could do for him. You owe it to him the deepest, the highest he waked up in you. He opened the wings of your soul.”

HUNGER

Shenah Pessah paused in the midst of scrubbing the stairs of the tenement. “Ach!” she sighed. “How can his face still burn so in me when he is so long gone? How the deadness in me flames up with life at the thought of him!”

Shenah Pessah

The dark hallway seemed flooded with white radiance. She closed her eyes that she might see more vividly the beloved features. The glowing smile that healed all ills of life and changed her from the weary drudge into the vibrant creature of joy.

It was all a miracle—his coming, this young professor from one of the big colleges. He had rented a room in the very house where she was janitress so as to be near the people he was writing about. But more wonderful than all was the way he stopped to talk to 

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