In reply she learned that Rachel was engaged to be married.  Her correspondents were too taken up with this gigantic fact to pay satisfactory attention to her inquiries.  The old sense of protecting motherhood came back to Esther when she learned the news.  Rachel was only eighteen, but at once Esther felt middle-aged.  It seemed of the fitness of things that she should go to America and resume her interrupted maternal duties.  Isaac and Sarah were still little more than children, perhaps they had not yet ceased bickering about their birthdays.  She knew her little ones would jump for joy, and Isaac still volunteer sleeping accommodation in his new bed, even though the necessity for it had ceased.  She cried when she received the cutting from the American Jewish paper; under other circumstances she would have laughed.  It was one of a batch headed “Personals,” and ran:  “Sam Wiseberg, the handsome young drummer, of Cincinnati, has become engaged to Rachel Ansell, the fair eighteen-year-old type-writer and daughter of Moses Ansell, a well-known Chicago Hebrew.  Life’s sweetest blessings on the pair!  The marriage will take place in the Fall.”  Esther dried her eyes and determined to be present at the ceremony.  It is so grateful to the hesitant soul to be presented with a landmark.  There was nothing to be gained now by arriving before the marriage; nay, her arrival just in time for it would clench the festivities.  Meantime she attached herself to Hannah’s charitable leading-strings, alternately attracted to the Children of the Ghetto by their misery, and repulsed by their failings.  She seemed to see them now in their true perspective, correcting the vivid impressions of childhood by the insight born of wider knowledge of life.  The accretion of pagan superstition was greater than she had recollected.  Mothers averted fever by a murmured charm and an expectoration, children in new raiment carried bits of coal or salt in their pockets to ward off the evil-eve.  On the other hand, there was more resourcefulness, more pride of independence.  Her knowledge of Moses Ansell had misled her into too sweeping a generalization.  And she was surprised to realize afresh how much illogical happiness flourished amid penury, ugliness and pain.  After school-hours the muggy air vibrated with the joyous laughter of little children, tossing their shuttlecocks, spinning their tops, turning their skipping-ropes, dancing to barrel-organs or circling hand-in-hand in rings to the sound of the merry traditional chants of childhood.  Esther often purchased a pennyworth of exquisite pleasure by enriching some sad-eyed urchin.  Hannah (whose own scanty surplus was fortunately augmented by an anonymous West-End Reform Jew, who employed her as his agent) had no prepossessions to correct, no pendulum-oscillations to distract her, no sentimental illusions to sustain her.  She knew the Ghetto as it was; neither expected gratitude from the poor, nor feared she might “pauperize them,”