Great magic shops where all things were to be had; peppermints and cotton, china-faced dolls and lemons, had dwindled into the front windows of tiny private dwelling-houses; the black-wigged crones, the greasy shambling men, were uglier and greasier than she had ever conceived them.  They seemed caricatures of humanity; scarecrows in battered hats or draggled skirts.  But gradually, as the scene grew upon her, she perceived that in spite of the “model dwellings” builder, it was essentially unchanged.  No vestige of improvement had come over Wentworth Street:  the narrow noisy market street, where serried barrows flanked the reeking roadway exactly as of old, and where Esther trod on mud and refuse and babies.  Babies!  They were everywhere; at the breasts of unwashed women, on the knees of grandfathers smoking pipes, playing under the barrows, sprawling in the gutters and the alleys.  All the babies’ faces were sickly and dirty with pathetic, childish prettinesses asserting themselves against the neglect and the sallowness.  One female mite in a dingy tattered frock sat in an orange-box, surveying the bustling scene with a preternaturally grave expression, and realizing literally Esther’s early conception of the theatre.  There was a sense of blankness in the wanderer’s heart, of unfamiliarity in the midst of familiarity.  What had she in common with all this mean wretchedness, with this semi-barbarous breed of beings?  The more she looked, the more her heart sank.  There was no flaunting vice, no rowdiness, no drunkenness, only the squalor of an oriental city without its quaintness and color.  She studied the posters and the shop-windows, and caught old snatches of gossip from the groups in the butchers’ shops—­all seemed as of yore.  And yet here and there the hand of Time had traced new inscriptions.  For Baruch Emanuel the hand of Time had written a new placard.  It was a mixture of German, bad English and Cockneyese, phonetically spelt in Hebrew letters: 

    Mens Solen Und Eelen, 2/6
    Lydies Deeto, 1/6
    Kindersche Deeto, 1/6
    Hier wird gemacht
    Aller Hant Sleepers
      Fur Trebbelers
    Zu De Billigsten Preissen.

Baruch Emanuel had prospered since the days when he wanted “lasters and riveters” without being able to afford them.  He no longer gratuitously advertised Mordecai Schwartz in envious emulation, for he had several establishments and owned five two-story houses, and was treasurer of his little synagogue, and spoke of Socialists as an inferior variety of Atheists.  Not that all this bourgeoning was to be counted to leather, for Baruch had developed enterprises in all directions, having all the versatility of Moses Ansell without his catholic capacity for failure.