d 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