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.”

“Summons me, indeed,” laughed back Mrs. Isaacs.  “A fat lot I’d care for that.  You’d jolly soon expose your character to the magistrate.  Everybody knows what you are.”

“Your mother!” retorted Mrs. Jacobs mechanically; the elliptical method of expression being greatly in vogue for conversation of a loud character.  Quick as lightning came the parrying stroke.

“Yah!  And what was your father, I should like to know?”

Mrs. Isaacs had no sooner made this inquiry than she became conscious of an environment of suppressed laughter; Mrs. Jacobs awoke to the situation a second later, and the two women stood suddenly dumbfounded, petrified, with arms akimbo, staring at each other.

The wise, if apocryphal, Ecclesiasticus, sagely and pithily remarked, many centuries before modern civilization was invented:  Jest not with a rude man lest thy ancestors be disgraced.  To this day the oriental methods of insult have survived in the Ghetto.  The dead past is never allowed to bury its dead; the genealogical dust-heap is always liable to be raked up, and even innocuous ancestors may be traduced to the third and fourth generation.

Now it so happened that Mrs. Isaacs and Mrs. Jacobs were sisters.  And when it dawned upon them into what dilemma their automatic methods of carte and tierce had inveigled them, they were frozen with confusion.  They retired crestfallen to their respective parlors, and sported their oaks.  The resources of repartee were dried up for the moment.  Relatives are unduly handicapped in these verbal duels; especially relatives with the same mother and father.