outsider foisted upon him by a philanthropic factotum should
benefit by this goodness of his. He discoursed to me in moved terms of
the sorrows and privations of his tenants in their two tiny rooms
upstairs. And all the while Quarriar preserved his attitude of
drooping dignity, saying no syllable except under special appeal.

The landlord produced a goblet of rum and shrub for the benefit of the
high-born visitor, and we all clinked glasses, the young master-tailor
beaming at me unctuously as he set down his glass.

'I love company,' he cried, with no apparent consciousness of impudent
familiarity.

I returned, however, to my central interest in life--the
piece-sorting. It occurred to me afterwards that possibly I ought not
to have insisted on such a secular subject on a Jewish holiday, but,
after all, the landlord had broached it, and both men now entered most
cordially into the discussion. The landlord started repeating his
lament--what a pity it would be if Quarriar were really forced to
accept Conn's partner--when Quarriar timidly blurted out that he had
already signed the deed of partnership, though he had not yet received
the promised capital from Conn, nor spoken over matters with the
partner provided. The landlord seemed astonished and angry at learning
this, pricking up his ears curiously at the word 'signed,' and giving
Quarriar a look of horror.

'Signed!' he cried in Yiddish. '_What_ hast thou signed?'

At this point the landlord's wife joined us in the parlour, with a
pretty child in her arms and another shy one clinging to her skirts,
completing the picture of felicity and prosperity, and throwing into
greater shadow the attic to which I shortly afterwards climbed my way
up the steep, airless stairs. I was hardly prepared for the depressing
spectacle that awaited me at their summit. It was not so much the
shabby, fusty rooms, devoid of everything save a couple of mattresses,
a rickety wooden table, a chair or two, and a heap of Passover cakes,
as the unloveliness of the three women who stood there, awkward and
flushing before their important visitor. The wife-and-mother was
dwarfed and black-wigged, the daughters were squat, with
tallow-coloured round faces, vaguely suggestive of Caucasian peasants,
while the sightless eye of the elder lent a final touch of ugliness.

How little my academic friends know me who imagine I am allured by the
ugly! It is only that sometimes I see through it a beauty that