"Why, Esther," said Jacob quietly in soft Hungarian, "I've been wondering where you were."
The lady mit the from-gold hair laid her other hand on his, smiled a little wearily, and instantly dropped asleep.
"You ain't asked her whose is that baby," his daughter whispered to him. "You ain't asked her did she write letters on that Stork?"
"I guess it's our baby all right," her father answered. "You just carry it down and put it in the bed that's been waiting for it. Tell Mrs. Moriarty that your auntie was living here all the time."
"Mine auntie!" cried Esther. "Mine auntie! My, but Storks is smart!" she gasped repentantly.
"Stands a girl by our block," Eva Gonorowsky began, as she and her friend Yetta Aaronsohn wended their homeward way through the crowded purlieus of Gouverneur and Monroe Streets, "stands a girl by our block what don't never goes on the school."
Yetta was obediently shocked. She had but recently been rescued from a like benightment, but both she and her friend tactfully ignored this fact.
"Don't the Truant Officer gets her?" the convert questioned, remembering her own means to grace, and the long struggle she had made against it. "Don't the Truant Officer comes on her house und says cheek on her mamma, und brings her--by the hair, maybe--on the school?"
"Well, he's comin'," Yetta predicted. "He comes all times."
"I guess," commented Eva, "I guess Rosie Rashnowsky needs somebody shall make somethings like that mit her. In all my world I ain't never see how she makes. She don't know what is polite. She puts her on mit funny clothes und 'fer-ladies-shoes.' She is awful fresh, und"--here Eva dropped her voice to a tone proper to a climax--"she dances on organs even."
Now Yetta Aaronsohn, in the days before the Truant Officer and the Renaissance, would have run breathless blocks at the distant lure of a street organ, and would have footed it merrily up and down the sidewalk in all the apparently spontaneous intricacies which make this kind of dancing so absorbing to the performer, and so charming to the audience. Now, however, she shuddered under the shock of such depravity. School had taught her many things not laid down in the official course of study.
Not all subjects of gossip are as confirmative as Rosie Rashnowsky that day proved herself to be. For as Yetta and Eva turned into Clinton Street, Rosie was discovered dancing madly to the strains of a one-legged hurdy-gurdy, in the midst of an envious but not emulating crowd.