is day the pattern of the shawl I
bought for my mother. When I came home and unpacked my treasures, I
was the proudest girl in Polotzk.

The proudest, but not the happiest. I found my family in such a
pitiful state that all my joy was stifled by care, if only for a
while.

Unwilling to spoil my holiday, my mother had not written me how things
had gone from bad to worse during my absence, and I was not prepared.
Fetchke met me at the station, and conducted me to a more wretched
hole than I had ever called home before.

I went into the room alone, having been greeted outside by my mother
and brother. It was evening, and the shabbiness of the apartment was
all the gloomier for the light of a small kerosene lamp standing on
the bare deal table. At one end of the table--is this Deborah? My
little sister, dressed in an ugly gray jacket, sat motionless in the
lamplight, her fair head drooping, her little hands folded on the edge
of the table. At sight of her I grew suddenly old. It was merely that
she was a shy little girl, unbecomingly dressed, and perhaps a little
pale from underfeeding. But to me, at that moment, she was the
personification of dejection, the living symbol of the fallen family
state.

Of course my sober mood did not last long. Even "fallen family state"
could be interpreted in terms of money--absent money--and that, as
once established, was a trifling matter. Hadn't I earned money myself?
Heaps of it! Only look at this, and this, and this that I brought from
Vitebsk, bought with my own money! No, I did not remain old. For many
years more I was a very childish child.

Perhaps I had spent my time in Vitebsk to better advantage than at the
milliner's, from any point of view. When I returned to my native town
I _saw_ things. I saw the narrowness, the stifling narrowness, of life
in Polotzk. My books, my walks, my visits, as teacher, to many homes,
had been so many doors opening on a wider world; so many horizons, one
beyond the other. The boundaries of life had stretched, and I had
filled my lungs with the thrilling air from a great Beyond. Child
though I was, Polotzk, when I came back, was too small for me.

And even Vitebsk, for all its peepholes into a Beyond, presently began
to shrink in my imagination, as America loomed near. My father's
letters warned us to prepare for the summons, and we lived in a quiver
of expectation.

Not that my father had grown suddenly rich. He was so far from rich
that h