“As well as an old woman has a right to expect.  The Most High is good!” Malka was in her most amiable mood, to emphasize to outsiders the injustice of her kin in quarrelling with her.  She was a tall woman of fifty, with a tanned equine gypsy face surmounted by a black wig, and decorated laterally by great gold earrings.  Great black eyes blazed beneath great black eyebrows, and the skin between them was capable of wrinkling itself black with wrath.  A gold chain was wound thrice round her neck, and looped up within her black silk bodice.  There were numerous rings on her fingers, and she perpetually smelt of peppermint.

“Nu, stand not chattering there,” she went on.  “Come in.  Dost thou wish me to catch my death of cold?”

Moses slouched timidly within, his head bowed as if in dread of knocking against the top of the door.  The room was a perfect fac-simile of Milly’s parlor at the other end of the diagonal, save that instead of the festive bottles and paper bags on the small side-table, there was a cheerless clothes-brush.  Like Milly’s, the room contained a round table, a chest of drawers with decanters on the top, and a high mantelpiece decorated with pendant green fringes, fastened by big-headed brass nails.  Here cheap china dogs, that had had more than their day squatted amid lustres with crystal drops.  Before the fire was a lofty steel guard, which, useful enough in Milly’s household, had survived its function in Malka’s, where no one was ever likely to tumble into the grate.  In a corner of the room a little staircase began to go upstairs.  There was oilcloth on the floor.  In Zachariah Square anybody could go into anybody else’s house and feel at home.  There was no visible difference between one and another.  Moses sat down awkwardly on a chair and refused a peppermint.  In the end he accepted an apple, blessed God for creating the fruit of the tree, and made a ravenous bite at it.

“I must take peppermints,” Malka explained.  “It’s for the spasms.”

“But you said you were well,” murmured Moses.

“And suppose?  If I did not take peppermint I should have the spasms.  My poor sister Rosina, peace be upon him, who died of typhoid, suffered greatly from the spasms.  It’s in the family.  She would have died of asthma if she had lived long enough. Nu, how goes it with thee?” she went on, suddenly remembering that Moses, too, had a right to be ill.  At bottom, Malka felt a real respect for Moses, though he did not know it.  It dated from the day he cut a chip of mahogany out of her best round table.  He had finished cutting his nails, and wanted a morsel of wood to burn with them in witness of his fulfilment of the pious custom.  Malka raged, but in her inmost heart there was admiration for such unscrupulous sanctity.

“I have been out of work for three weeks,” Moses answered, omitting to expound the state of his health in view of more urgent matters.