The Mosher Turkletaubs occupied an eight-room-and-two-baths apartment near by.  Sara, with much of the fleetness gone from her face and a smile tempered by a look of unshed tears, marketing now by white-enameled desk telephone or, on days when the limp from an old burn down her thigh was not too troublesome, walked up to a plate-glass butcher shop on 125th Street, where there was not so much as a drop of blood on the marble counter and the fowl hung in white, plucked window display with garnitures of pink tissue paper about the ankles and even the dangling heads wrapped so that the dead eyes might not give offense.

It was a widely different Sara from the water lugger of those sweaty Russian days.  Such commonplaces of environment as elevator service, water at the turning of a tap, potatoes dug and delivered to her dumbwaiter, had softened Sara and, it is true, vanquished, along with the years, some of the wing flash of vitality from across her face.  So was the tough fiber of her skin vanquished to almost a creaminess, and her hair, due perhaps to the warm water always on tap, had taken on a sheen, and even through its grayness grew out hardily and was well trained to fall in soft scallops over the singed place.

Yes, all in all, life had sweetened Sara, and, except for the occasional look of crucifixion somewhere back in her eyes, had roly-polied her into new rotundities of hip and shelf of bosom, and even to what mischievously promised to be a scallop of second chin.

Sara Turkletaub, daughter of a ne’er-do-well who had died before her birth with the shadow of an unproved murder on him; Sara, who had run swiftly barefoot for the first dozen summers of her life, and married, without dower or approval, the reckless son of old Turkletaub, the peddler; Sara, who once back in the dim years, when a bull had got loose in the public square, had jerked him to a halt by swinging herself from his horns, and later, standing by, had helped hold him for the emergency of an un-kosher slaughter, not even paling at the slitting noises of the knife.

Mosher Turkletaub, who had peddled new feet for stockings and calico for the sacques the peasant women wore in the fields, reckoning no longer in dozens of rubles but in dozens of thousands!  Indeed, Turkletaub Brothers could now afford to owe the bank one hundred thousand dollars!  Mosher dwelling thus, thighs gone flabby, in a seven-story apartment house with a liveried lackey to swing open the front door and another to shoot him upward in a gilded elevator.

It was to laugh!

And Sara and Mosher with their son, their turbulent Nikolai, now an accredited Doctor of Law and practicing before the bar of the city of New York!

It was upon that realization, most of all, that Sara could surge tears, quickly and hotly, and her heart seem to hurt of fullness.

Of Nikolai, the black.  Nicholas, now: 

It was not without reason that Sara had cried terrible tears over him, and that much, but not all, of the struggle was gone from her face.  Her boy could be as wayward as the fling to his fierce black head, and sickeningly often Mosher, with a nausea at the very pit of him, had wielded the lash.