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‘Certainly she has money,’ said his mother vindictively. ‘She has thousands of Gulden in her stocking. Twenty years ago she could have had her pick of a dozen well-to-do widowers, yet now that she has one foot in the grave, madness has entered her soul, and she has cast her eye upon this pauper.’

‘But I thought his father left him his inn,’ said the artist.

‘His inn–yes. His sense–no. Yossel ruined himself long ago paying too much attention to the Talmud instead of his business. He was always a Schlemihl.’

‘But can one pay too much attention to the Talmud? That is a strange saying for a Rabbi’s daughter.’

‘King Solomon tells us there is a time for everything,’ returned the Rabbi’s daughter. ‘Yossel neglected what the wise King said, and so now he comes trying to wheedle your poor grandmother out of her money. If he wanted to marry, why didn’t he marry before eighteen, as the Talmud prescribes?’

‘He seems to do everything at the wrong time,’ laughed her son. ‘Do you suppose, by the way, that King Solomon made all his thousand marriages before he was eighteen?’

‘Make not mock of holy things,’ replied his mother angrily.

The monetary explanation of the romance, he found, was the popular one in the village. It did not, however, exculpate the grandame from the charge of forwardness, since if she wished to contract another marriage it could have been arranged legitimately by the Shadchan, and then the poor marriage-broker, who got little enough to do in this God-forsaken village, might have made a few Gulden out of it.

Beneath all his artistic perception of the humours of the thing, Schneemann found himself prosaically sharing the general disapprobation of the marriage. Really, when one came to think of it, it was ridiculous that he should have a new grandfather thrust upon him. And such a grandfather! Perhaps the Bube was, indeed, losing her reason. Or was it he himself who was losing his reason, taking seriously this parochial scandal, and believing that because a doddering hunchback of seventy-five had borrowed an ethical treatise from an octogenarian a marriage must be on the tapis? Yet, on more than one occasion, he came upon circumstances which seemed to justify the popular supposition. There could be no doubt, for example, that when at the conclusion of the synagogue service the feminine stream from the women’s gallery poured out to mingle with the issuing males, these two atoms drifted together with unnatural celerity. It appeared to be established beyond question that on the preceding Feast of Tabernacles the Bube had lent and practically abandoned to the hunchback’s use the ritual palm-branch he was too poor to afford. Of course this might only have been gratitude, inasmuch as a fortnight earlier on the solemn New Year Day when, by an untimely decree, the grandmother lay ill abed, Yossel had obtained possession of the Shofar, and leaving the synagogue had gone to blow it to her. He had blown the holy horn–with due regard to the proprieties–in the downstairs room of her cottage so that she above had heard it, and having heard it could breakfast. It was a performance that charity reasonably required for a disabled fellow-creature, and yet what medieval knight had found a more delicate way of trumpeting his mistress’s charms? Besides, how had Yossel known that the heroine was ill? His eye must have roved over the women’s gallery, and disentangled her absence even from the huddled mass of weeping and swaying womanhood.

One day came the crowning item of evidence. The grandmother had actually asked the village postman to oblige her by delivering a brown parcel at Yossel’s lodgings. The postman was not a Child of the Covenant, but Yossel’s landlady was, and within an hour all Jewry knew that Yenta had sent Yossel a phylacteries-bag–the very symbol of love offered by a maiden to her bridegroom. Could shameless passion further go?