Esther
forgive her father when the Ansells waited weeks and weeks for a postal
order and landlords were threatening to bundle them out neck and crop,
and her mother's hands were worn to the bone slaving for her little
ones.

Things improved a little just before the mother died, for they had
settled down in London and Moses earned eighteen shillings a week as a
machinist and presser, and no longer roamed the country. But the
interval of happiness was brief. The grandmother, imported from Poland,
did not take kindly to her son's wife, whom she found wanting in the
minutiae of ceremonial piety and godless enough to wear her own hair.
There had been, indeed, a note of scepticism, of defiance, in Esther's
mother, a hankering after the customs of the heathen, which her
grandmother divined instinctively and resented for the sake of her son
and the post-mundane existence of her grandchildren. Mrs. Ansell's
scepticism based itself upon the uncleanliness which was so generally
next to godliness in the pious circles round them, and she had been
heard to express contempt for the learned and venerable Israelite, who,
being accosted by an acquaintance when the shadows of eve were beginning
to usher in the Day of Atonement, exclaimed:

"For heaven's sake, don't stop me--I missed my bath last year."

Mrs. Ansell bathed her children from head to foot once a month, and even
profanely washed them on the Sabbath, and had other strange, uncanny
notions. She professed not to see the value to God, man or beast of the
learned Rabbonim, who sat shaking themselves all day in the _Beth
Hamidrash_, and said they would be better occupied in supporting their
families, a view which, though mere surface blasphemy on the part of the
good woman and primarily intended as a hint to Moses to study less and
work longer, did not fail to excite lively passages of arms between the
two women. But death ended these bickerings and the _Bube_, who had
frequently reproached her son for bringing her into such an atheistic
country, was left a drag the more upon the family deprived at once of a
mother and a bread-winner. Old Mrs. Ansell was unfit: for anything save
grumbling, and so the headship naturally devolved upon Esther, whom her
mother's death left a woman getting on for eight. The commencement of
her reign coincided with a sad bisection of territory. Shocking as it
may be to better regulated minds, these seven people lived in one room.
Moses and the two bo