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And despite all this glitter of imposing images a subconscious thought was forcing itself more and more clearly to the surface of his mind. That aureole of golden hair, those piquant dark eyes! The Yvonne the cheap illustrated papers had made him familiar with had lacked this revelation of colour! But no, the idea was insane!

This scintillating celebrity his lost Gittel!

Bah! Misery had made him childish. Goldwater had, indeed, blossomed out since the days of his hired hall in Spitalfields, but his fame remained exclusively Yiddish and East-side. But Gittel!

How could that obscure rush-light of the London Ghetto Theatre have blazed into the Star of Paris and New York?

This Lent-keeping demoiselle the little Polish Jewess who had munched Passover cake at his table in the far-off happy days! This gilded idol the impecunious Gittel he had caressed!

‘You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert?’ he inquired of his neighbour, a pock-marked, spectacled young woman, who, as record-breaker of the establishment, had refused to join the strike of the mere hundred-and-fifty a day.

The young woman swiftly drew a knife from the wooden pail beside her, and deftly scraped at a rough hinge as she replied: ‘No, but I guess she’s the actress who gets all the flowers, and won’t pay for ’em.’

He saw she had mixed up the two lawsuits, but the description seemed to hit off his Gittel to the life. Yes, Gittel had always got all the flowers of life, and dodged paying. Ah, she had always been diabolically clever, unscrupulously ambitious! Who could put bounds to her achievement? She had used him and thrown him away–without a word, without a regret. She had washed her hands of him as light-heartedly as he washed his of the dirty, sticky day’s paste. What other ‘pious philanthropist’ had she found to replace him? Whither had she fled? Why not to Paris that her theatric gifts might receive training?

This chic, this witchery, with which reputation credited her–had not Gittel possessed it all? Had not her heroines enchanted the Ghetto?

Oh, but this was a wild day-dream, insubstantial as the smoke-wreaths of the Yvonne Rupert cigar!

III

But the obsession persisted. In his miserable attic off Hester Street–that recalled the attic he had found her in, though it was many stories nearer the sky–he warmed himself with Gittel’s image, smiling, light-darting, voluptuous. Night and sleep surrendered him to grotesque combinations–Gittel Goldstein smoking cigarettes in a bath-room, Yvonne Rupert playing Yiddish heroines in a little chapel.

In the clear morning these absurdities were forgotten in the realized absurdity of the initial identification. But a forenoon at the pasting-desk brought back the haunting thought. At noon he morbidly expended his lunch-dime on an ‘Yvonne Rupert’ cigar, and smoked it with a semi-insane feeling that he was repossessing his Gittel. Certainly it was delicious.

He wandered into the box-making room, where the man who tended the witty nail-driving machine was seated on a stack of Mexican cedar-wood, eating from a package of sausage and scrapple that sent sobering whiffs to the reckless smoker.

‘You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert?’ he asked wistfully.

‘Might as well ask if I’d smoked her cigar!’ grumbled the nailer through his mouthfuls.

‘But there’s a gallery at Webster and Dixie’s.’

‘Su-er!’

‘I guess I’ll go some day, just for curiosity.’

But the great Yvonne, he found, was flaming in her provincial orbit. So he must needs wait.

Meantime, on a Saturday night, with a dirty two-dollar bill in his pocket, and jingling some odd cents, he lounged into the restaurant where the young Russian bloods assembled who wrote for the Yiddish Labour papers, and ‘knew it all.’ He would draw them out about Yvonne Rupert. He established himself near a table at which long-haired, long-fingered Freethinkers were drinking chocolate and discussing Lassalle.

‘Ah, but the way he jumped on a table when only a schoolboy to protest against the master’s injustice to one of his schoolfellows! How the divine fire flamed in him!’

They talked on, these clamorous sceptics, amplifying the Lassalle legend, broidering it with Messianic myths, with the same fantastic Oriental invention that had illuminated the plain Pentateuch with imaginative vignettes, and transfiguring the dry abstractions of Socialism with the same passionate personalization. He listened impatiently. He had never been caught by Socialism, even at his hungriest. He had once been an employer himself, and his point of view survived.