The last crisis had been brief, and there was so little danger that, when Milly's child was circumcised, Moses had not even been bidden to the feast, though his piety would have made him the ideal _sandek_ or god-father. He did not resent this, knowing himself dust--and that anything but gold-dust.
Moses had hardly emerged from the little arched passage which led to the Square, when sounds of strife fell upon his ears. Two stout women chatting amicably at their doors, had suddenly developed a dispute. In Zachariah Square, when you wanted to get to the bottom of a quarrel, the cue was not "find the woman," but find the child. The high-spirited bantlings had a way of pummelling one another in fistic duels, and of calling in their respective mothers when they got the worse of it--which is cowardly, but human. The mother of the beaten belligerent would then threaten to wring the "year," or to twist the nose of the victorious party--sometimes she did it. In either case, the other mother would intervene, and then the two bantlings would retire into the background and leave their mothers to take up the duel while they resumed their interrupted game.
Of such sort was the squabble betwixt Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs. Mrs. Isaacs pointed out with superfluous vehemence that her poor lamb had been mangled beyond recognition. Mrs. Jacobs, _per contra_, asseverated with superfluous gesture that it was _her_ poor lamb who had received irreparable injury. These statements were not in mutual contradiction, but Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs were, and so the point at issue was gradually absorbed in more personal recriminations.
"By my life, and by my Fanny's life, I'll leave my seal on the first child of yours that comes across my way! There!" Thus Mrs. Isaacs.
"Lay a linger on a hair of a child of mine, and, by my husband's life, I'll summons you; I'll have the law on you." Thus Mrs. Jacobs; to the gratification of the resident populace.
Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs rarely quarrelled with each other, uniting rather in opposition to the rest of the Square. They were English, quite English, their grandfather having been born in Dresden; and they gave themselves airs in consequence, and called their _kinder_ "children," which annoyed those neighbors who found a larger admixture of Yiddish necessary for conversation. These very _kinder_, again, attained considerable importance among their school-fellows by refusing to pronounce the guttural "ch" of the Hebrew otherwise than as an English "k."