“Library? How? Where?”

Her lack of contact with Americanizing agencies appalled him.

“I’ll have to introduce you to the library when I come to live here,” he said.

“Oi-i! You really like it, the room?” Shenah Pessah clapped her hands in a burst of uncontrollable delight.

“I like the room very much, and I shall be glad to take it if you can get it ready for me by next week.”

Shenah Pessah looked up at the man. “Do you mean it? You really want to come and live here, in this place? The sky is falling to the earth!”

“Live here?” Most decidedly he would live here. He became suddenly enthusiastic. But it was the enthusiasm of the scientist for the specimen of his experimentation—of the sculptor for the clay that would take form under his touch.

“I’m coming here to live—” He was surprised at the eager note in his voice, the sudden leaven of joy that surged through his veins. “And I’m going to teach you to read sensible books, the kind that will help you more than your dream book.”

Shenah Pessah drank in his words with a joy that struck back as fear lest this man—the visible sign of her answered prayer—would any moment be snatched up and disappear in the heavens where he belonged. With a quick leap toward him she seized his hand in both her own. “Oi, mister! Would you like to learn me English lessons too? I’ll wash for you your shirts for it. If you would even only talk to me, it would be more to me than all the books in the world.”

He instinctively recoiled at this outburst of demonstrativeness. His eyes narrowed and his answer was deliberate. “Yes, you ought to learn English,” he said, resuming his professional tone, but the girl was too overwrought to notice the change in his manner.

“There it is,” he thought to himself on his way out. “The whole gamut of the Russian Jew—the pendulum swinging from abject servility to boldest aggressiveness.”

Shenah Pessah remained standing and smiling to herself after Mr. Barnes left. She did not remember a thing she had said. She only felt herself whirling in space, millions of miles beyond the earth. The god of dreams had arrived and nothing on earth could any longer hold her down.

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