that too was robbery.  It was all robbery, for a poor man.  After half an hour of such depressing conversation, they had their minds quite made up that they had been saved at the brink of a precipice; but then Szedvilas went away, and Jonas, who was a sharp little man, reminded them that the delicatessen business was a failure, according to its proprietor, and that this might account for his pessimistic views.  Which, of course, reopened the subject!

The controlling factor was that they could not stay where they were—­they had to go somewhere.  And when they gave up the house plan and decided to rent, the prospect of paying out nine dollars a month forever they found just as hard to face.  All day and all night for nearly a whole week they wrestled with the problem, and then in the end Jurgis took the responsibility.  Brother Jonas had gotten his job, and was pushing a truck in Durham’s; and the killing gang at Brown’s continued to work early and late, so that Jurgis grew more confident every hour, more certain of his mastership.  It was the kind of thing the man of the family had to decide and carry through, he told himself.  Others might have failed at it, but he was not the failing kind—­he would show them how to do it.  He would work all day, and all night, too, if need be; he would never rest until the house was paid for and his people had a home.  So he told them, and so in the end the decision was made.

They had talked about looking at more houses before they made the purchase; but then they did not know where any more were, and they did not know any way of finding out.  The one they had seen held the sway in their thoughts; whenever they thought of themselves in a house, it was this house that they thought of.  And so they went and told the agent that they were ready to make the agreement.  They knew, as an abstract proposition, that in matters of business all men are to be accounted liars; but they could not but have been influenced by all they had heard from the eloquent agent, and were quite persuaded that the house was something they had run a risk of losing by their delay.  They drew a deep breath when he told them that they were still in time.

They were to come on the morrow, and he would have the papers all drawn up.  This matter of papers was one in which Jurgis understood to the full the need of caution; yet he could not go himself—­every one told him that he could not get a holiday, and that he might lose his job by asking.  So there was nothing to be done but to trust it to the women, with Szedvilas, who promised to go with them.  Jurgis spent a whole evening impressing upon them the seriousness of the occasion—­and then finally, out of innumerable hiding places about their persons and in their baggage, came forth the precious wads of money, to be done up tightly in a little bag and sewed fast in the lining of Teta Elzbieta’s dress.