the
poorhouse, and brought him up with every advantage that money could
buy. My mother, on her visits, was thrown a great deal into this boy's
society, but she liked him less than the poodle. This grieved her
aunt, who cherished in her heart the hope that my mother would marry
her adopted son, and so become her daughter after all. And in order
to accustom her to think well of the match, Hode dinned the boy's name
in my mother's ears day and night, praising him and showing him off.
She would open her jewel boxes and take out the flashing diamonds,
heavy chains, and tinkling bracelets, dress my mother in them in front
of the mirror, telling her that they would all be hers--all her
own--when she became the bride of Mulke.

My mother still describes the necklace of pearls and diamonds which
her aunt used to clasp around her plump throat, with a light in her
eyes that is reminiscent of girlish pleasure. But to all her aunt's
teasing references to the future, my mother answered with a giggle and
a shake of her black curls, and went on enjoying herself, thinking
that the day of judgment was very, very far away. But it swooped down
on her sooner than she expected--the momentous hour when she must
choose between the pearl necklace with Mulke and a penniless stranger
from Yuchovitch who was reputed to be a fine scholar.

Mulke she would not have even if all the pearls in the ocean came with
him. The boy was stupid and unteachable, and of unspeakable origin.
Picked up from the dirty floor of the poorhouse, his father was
identified as the lazy porter who sometimes chopped a cord of wood for
my grandmother; and his sisters were slovenly housemaids scattered
through Polotzk. No, Mulke was not to be considered. But why consider
anybody? Why think of a _hossen_ at all, when she was so content? My
mother ran away every time the shadchan came, and she begged to be
left as she was, and cried, and invoked her mother's support. But her
mother, for the first time in her history, refused to take the
daughter's part. She joined the enemy--the family and the
shadchan--and my mother saw that she was doomed.

Of course she submitted. What else could a dutiful daughter do, in
Polotzk? She submitted to being weighed, measured, and appraised
before her face, and resigned herself to what was to come.

When that which was to come did come, she did not recognize it. She
was all alone in the store one day, when a beardless young man, in top
boots