“When I sit for joy,” retorted Pesach, “it will not be the season for valentines.”

“Won’t it though!” cried Becky, shaking her frizzly black curls.  “You’ll be a pair of comic ’uns.”

“All right, Becky,” said Alte good-humoredly.  “Your turn’ll come, and then we shall have the laugh of you.”

“Never,” said Becky.  “What do I want with a man?”

The arm of the specially invited young man was round her as she spoke.

“Don’t make schnecks,” said Fanny.

“It’s not affectation.  I mean it.  What’s the good of the men who visit father?  There isn’t a gentleman among them.”

“Ah, wait till I win on the lottery,” said the special young man.

“Then, vy not take another eighth of a ticket?” inquired Sugarman the Shadchan, who seemed to spring from the other end of the room.  He was one of the greatest Talmudists in London—­a lean, hungry-looking man, sharp of feature and acute of intellect.  “Look at Mrs. Robinson—­I’ve just won her over twenty pounds, and she only gave me two pounds for myself.  I call it a cherpah—­a shame.”

“Yes, but you stole another two pounds,” said Becky.

“How do you know?” said Sugarman startled.

Becky winked and shook her head sapiently.  “Never you mind.”

The published list of the winning numbers was so complex in construction that Sugarman had ample opportunities of bewildering his clients.

“I von’t sell you no more tickets,” said Sugarman with righteous indignation.

“A fat lot I care,” said Becky, tossing her curls.

“Thou carest for nothing,” said Mrs. Belcovitch, seizing the opportunity for maternal admonition.  “Thou hast not even brought me my medicine to-night.  Thou wilt find, it on the chest of drawers in the bedroom.”

Becky shook herself impatiently.

“I will go,” said the special young man.

“No, it is not beautiful that a young man shall go into my bedroom in my absence,” said Mrs. Belcovitch blushing.

Becky left the room.

“Thou knowest,” said Mrs. Belcovitch, addressing herself to the special young man, “I suffer greatly from my legs.  One is a thick one, and one a thin one.”

The young man sighed sympathetically.

“Whence comes it?” he asked.

“Do I know?  I was born so.  My poor lambkin (this was the way Mrs. Belcovitch always referred to her dead mother) had well-matched legs.  If I had Aristotle’s head I might be able to find out why my legs are inferior.  And so one goes about.”

The reverence for Aristotle enshrined in Yiddish idiom is probably due to his being taken by the vulgar for a Jew.  At any rate the theory that Aristotle’s philosophy was Jewish was advanced by the mediaeval poet, Jehuda Halevi, and sustained by Maimonides.  The legend runs that when Alexander went to Palestine, Aristotle was in his train.  At Jerusalem the philosopher had sight of King Solomon’s manuscripts, and he forthwith edited them and put his name to them.  But it is noteworthy that the story was only accepted by those Jewish scholars who adopted the Aristotelian philosophy, those who rejected it declaring that Aristotle in his last testament had admitted the inferiority of his writings to the Mosaic, and had asked that his works should be destroyed.