Mrs. Ansell bathed her children from head to foot once a month, and even profanely washed them on the Sabbath, and had other strange, uncanny notions.  She professed not to see the value to God, man or beast of the learned Rabbonim, who sat shaking themselves all day in the Beth Hamidrash, and said they would be better occupied in supporting their families, a view which, though mere surface blasphemy on the part of the good woman and primarily intended as a hint to Moses to study less and work longer, did not fail to excite lively passages of arms between the two women.  But death ended these bickerings and the Bube, who had frequently reproached her son for bringing her into such an atheistic country, was left a drag the more upon the family deprived at once of a mother and a bread-winner.  Old Mrs. Ansell was unfit:  for anything save grumbling, and so the headship naturally devolved upon Esther, whom her mother’s death left a woman getting on for eight.  The commencement of her reign coincided with a sad bisection of territory.  Shocking as it may be to better regulated minds, these seven people lived in one room.  Moses and the two boys slept in one bed and the grandmother and the three girls in another.  Esther had to sleep with her head on a supplementary pillow at the foot of the bed.  But there can be much love in a little room.

The room was not, however, so very little, for it was of ungainly sprawling structure, pushing out an odd limb that might have been cut off with a curtain.  The walls nodded fixedly to one another so that the ceiling was only half the size of the floor.  The furniture comprised but the commonest necessities.  This attic of the Ansells was nearer heaven than most earthly dwelling places, for there were four tall flights of stairs to mount before you got to it.  No. 1 Royal Street had been in its time one of the great mansions of the Ghetto; pillars of the synagogue had quaffed kosher wine in its spacious reception rooms and its corridors had echoed with the gossip of portly dames in stiff brocades.  It was stoutly built and its balusters were of carved oak.  But now the threshold of the great street door, which was never closed, was encrusted with black mud, and a musty odor permanently clung to the wide staircase and blent subtly with far-away reminiscences of Mr. Belcovitch’s festive turpentine.  The Ansells had numerous housemates, for No. 1 Royal Street was a Jewish colony in itself and the resident population was periodically swollen by the “hands” of the Belcovitches and by the “Sons of the Covenant,” who came to worship at their synagogue on the ground floor.  What with Sugarman the Shadchan, on the first floor, Mrs. Simons and Dutch Debby on the second, the Belcovitches on the third, and the Ansells and Gabriel Hamburg, the great scholar, on the fourth, the door-posts twinkled with Mezuzahs—­cases or cylinders containing sacred script with the word Shaddai (Almighty) peering out of a little glass eye at the centre.  Even Dutch Debby, abandoned wretch as she was, had this protection against evil spirits (so it has come to be regarded) on her lintel, though she probably never touched the eye with her finger to kiss the place of contact after the manner of the faithful.