Everywhere friends and neighbors were asking one another how they were bearing the fast, exhibiting their white tongues and generally comparing symptoms, the physical aspects of the Day of Atonement more or less completely diverting attention from the spiritual.  Smelling-salts passed from hand to hand, and men explained to one another that, but for the deprivation of their cigars, they could endure Yom Kippur with complacency.

Esther passed the Ghetto school, within which free services were going on even in the playground, poor Russians and Poles, fanatically observant, fore-gathering with lax fishmongers and welshers; and without which hulking young men hovered uneasily, feeling too out of tune with religion to go in, too conscious of the terrors of the day to stay entirely away.  From the interior came from sunrise to nightfall a throbbing thunder of supplication, now pealing in passionate outcry, now subsiding to a low rumble.  The sounds of prayer that pervaded the Ghetto, and burst upon her at every turn, wrought upon Esther strangely; all her soul went out in sympathy with these yearning outbursts; she stopped every now and then to listen, as in those far-off days when the Sons of the Covenant drew her with their melancholy cadences.

At last, moved by an irresistible instinct, she crossed the threshold of a large Chevrah she had known in her girlhood, mounted the stairs and entered the female compartment without hostile challenge.  The reek of many breaths and candles nearly drove her back, but she pressed forwards towards a remembered window, through a crowd of be-wigged women, shaking their bodies fervently to and fro.

This room had no connection with the men’s; it was simply the room above part of theirs, and the declamations of the unseen cantor came but faintly through the flooring, though the clamor of the general masculine chorus kept the pious au courant with their husbands.  When weather or the whims of the more important ladies permitted, the window at the end was opened; it gave upon a little balcony, below which the men’s chamber projected considerably, having been built out into the back yard.  When this window was opened simultaneously with the skylight in the men’s synagogue, the fervid roulades of the cantor were as audible to the women as to their masters.

Esther had always affected the balcony:  there the air was comparatively fresh, and on fine days there was a glimpse of blue sky, and a perspective of sunny red tiles, where brown birds fluttered and cats lounged and little episodes arose to temper the tedium of endless invocation:  and farther off there was a back view of a nunnery, with visions of placid black-hooded faces at windows; and from the distance came a pleasant drone of monosyllabic spelling from fresh young voices, to relieve the ear from the monotony of long stretches of meaningless mumbling.