“How’s your aunt—­your aunt—­I forget her name.”

“Aunt Leah.  She’s gone to Liverpool.”

“What for?”

“She lives there; she has opened a branch store of granma’s business.  Who are you?” concluded Ezekiel candidly.

“You won’t remember me,” said Esther.  “Tell me, your aunt is called Mrs. Levine, isn’t she?”

“Oh yes, but,” with a shade of contempt, “she hasn’t got any children.”

“How many brothers and sisters have you got?” said Esther with a little laugh.

“Heaps.  Oh, but you won’t see them if you go in; they’re in school, most of ’em.”

“And why aren’t you at school?”

The Redeemed Son became scarlet.  “I’ve got a bad leg,” ran mechanically off his tongue.  Then, administering a savage thwack to his hoop, he set out in pursuit of it.  “It’s no good calling on mother,” he yelled back, turning his head unexpectedly.  “She ain’t in.”

Esther walked into the Square, where the same big-headed babies were still rocking in swings suspended from the lintels, and where the same ruddy-faced septuagenarians sat smoking short pipes and playing nap on trays in the sun.  From several doorways came the reek of fish frying.  The houses looked ineffably petty and shabby.  Esther wondered how she could ever have conceived this a region of opulence; still more how she could ever have located Malka and her family on the very outskirt of the semi-divine classes.  But the semi-divine persons themselves had long since shrunk and dwindled.

She found Malka brooding over the fire; on the side-table was the clothes-brush.  The great events of a crowded decade of European history had left Malka’s domestic interior untouched.  The fall of dynasties, philosophies and religions had not shaken one china dog from its place; she had not turned a hair of her wig; the black silk bodice might have been the same; the gold chain at her bosom was.  Time had written a few more lines on the tan-colored equine face, but his influence had been only skin deep.  Everybody grows old:  few people grow.  Malka was of the majority.

It was only with difficulty that she recollected Esther, and she was visibly impressed by the young lady’s appearance.

“It’s very good of you to come and see an old woman,” she said in her mixed dialect, which skipped irresponsibly from English to Yiddish and back again.  “It’s more than my own Kinder do.  I wonder they let you come across and see me.”

“I haven’t been to see them yet,” Esther interrupted.

“Ah, that explains it,” said Malka with satisfaction.  “They’d have told you, ’Don’t go and see the old woman, she’s meshuggah, she ought to be in the asylum.’  I bring children into the world and buy them husbands and businesses and bed-clothes, and this is my profit.  The other day my Milly—­the impudent-face!  I would have boxed her ears if she hadn’t been suckling Nathaniel.  Let her tell me again that