And as he trudged to the other end of the
village towards the cottage where the lively old lady lived in
self-sufficient solitude, he was full of the contrast between his
mother's mental world and his own. People live in their own minds, and
not in streets or fields, he philosophized.

II

Through her diamond-paned window he saw the wrinkled, white-capped old
creature spinning peacefully at the rustic chimney-corner, a pure
cloistral crone. It seemed profane to connect such a figure with
flirtation--this was surely the very virgin of senility. What a fine
picture she made too! Why had he never thought of painting her? Yes,
such a picture of 'The Spinster' would be distinctly interesting. And
he would put in the _Kesubah_, the marriage certificate that hung over
the mantelpiece, in ironical reminder of her days of bloom. He
unlatched the door--he had never been used to knock at grannie's door,
and the childish instinct came back to him.

'_Guten Abend_,' he said.

She adjusted a pair of horn spectacles, and peered at him.

'_Guten Abend_,' she murmured.

'You don't remember me--Vroomkely.' He used the old childish
diminutive of Abraham, though he had almost forgotten he owned the
name in full.

'Vroomkely,' she gasped, almost overturning her wheel as she sprang to
hug him in her skinny arms. He had a painful sense that she had shrunk
back almost to childish dimensions. Her hands seemed trembling as much
with decay as with emotion. She hastened to produce from the
well-known cupboard home-made _Kuchen_ and other dainties of his
youth, with no sense of the tragedy that lay in his no longer being
tempted by them.

'And how goes your trade?' she said. 'They say you have never been
slack. They must build many houses in Rome.' Her notion that he was a
house-painter he hardly cared to contradict, especially as
picture-painting was contrary to the Mosaic dispensation.

'Oh, I haven't been only in Rome,' he said evasively. 'I have been in
many lands.'

Fire came into her eyes, and flashed through the big spectacles. 'You
have been to Palestine?' she cried.

'No, only as far as Egypt. Why?'

'I thought you might have brought me a clod of Palestine earth to put
in my grave.' The fire died out of her spectacles, she sighed, and
took a consolatory pinch of snuff.

'Don't talk of graves--you will live to be a hundred and more,' he
cried. But he was thinking how ridiculous gossip was. It spared
neither age nor sexl