her, to question her about herself as though she were his equal. What warm friendliness had prompted him to take her out of her dark basement to the library where there were books to read!

And then—that unforgettable night on the way home, when the air was poignant with spring! Only a moment—a kiss—a pressure of hands! And the world shone with light—the empty, unlived years filled with love!

She was lost in dreams of her one hour of romance when a woman elbowed her way through the dim passage, leaving behind her the smell of herring and onions.

Shenah Pessah gripped the scrubbing-brush with suppressed fury. “Meshugeneh! Did you not swear to yourself that you would tear his memory out from your heart? If he would have been only a man I could have forgotten him. But he was not a man! He was God Himself! On whatever I look shines his face!”

The white radiance again suffused her. The brush dropped from her hand. “He—he is the beating in my heart! He is the life in me—the hope in me—the breath of prayer in me! If not for him in me, then what am I? Deadness—emptiness—nothingness! You are going out of your head. You are living only on rainbows. He is no more real—

“What is real? These rags I wear? This pail? This black hole? Or him and the dreams of him?” She flung her challenge to the murky darkness.

“Shenah Pessah! A black year on you!” came the answer from the cellar below. It was the voice of her uncle, Moisheh Rifkin.

“Oi weh!” she shrugged young shoulders, wearied by joyless toil. “He’s beginning with his hollering already.” And she hurried down.

“You piece of earth! Worms should eat you! How long does it take you to wash up the stairs?” he stormed. “Yesterday, the eating was burned to coal; and to-day you forget the salt.”

“What a fuss over a little less salt!”

“In the Talmud it stands a man has a right to divorce his wife for only forgetting him the salt in his soup.”

“Maybe that’s why Aunt Gittel went to the grave before her time—worrying how to please your taste in the mouth.”

The old man’s yellow, shriveled face stared up at her out of the gloom. “What has he from life? Only his pleasure in eating and going to the synagogue. How long will he live yet?” And moved by a surge of pity, “Why can’t I 

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