“This is the fifth bill I have made out,” he remarked, and he raised his voice to the pitch of his brethren of the Bowery when they hawk in the street.  “The fifth bill I have made out, and it is only for one dollar and fifty-three cents, and I am poor.”

His intellectual Semitic face took on an ignoble expression of one who squeezes justice to petty ends for his own deserts.  His whine penetrated the rising chorus of the other voices, even of the butcher, who was a countryman of his own, and who said something with dolorous fervor about the bill for meat which had been running for six weeks, and not a dollar paid.  He was of a more common sort, and rendered a trifle indifferent by a recent visit to a beer-saloon.  He was also somewhat stupefied by an excess of flesh, as to the true exigencies of life in general.  After he had spoken he coughed wheezily, settled his swelling bulk more comfortably in the red-velvet chair, and planted his wide-apart, elephantine legs more firmly on the floor, while he mentally appraised the Oriental rug beneath his feet, with a view to the possibility of his taking that in lieu of cash, and making a profitable bargain for its ultimate disposal with a cousin in trade in New York.  Looking up, he caught Rosenstein’s eyes just turning from a regard of the same rug, and the two men’s thoughts met with a mental clash.  Then the New Sanderson butcher, who was a great, handsome, blond man with a foam of yellow beard, German, but not Jew, strolled silently over to them, and with sharp eyes on the rug, conferred with the other two in low, eager whispers.  From that time they paid little attention to what was going on around them.  They talked, they gesticulated, they felt of the rug.

Madame Griggs, settling her skirts genteelly, spoke again.  “I guess my bill has been running fully as long as anybody’s here,” she said, in her small, shrill voice.  She eyed the two stenographers as she spoke, with jealous suspicion.  There was a certain smartness about their attire, and she suspected them of being City dress-makers.  She also suspected the strange young man with them of being a City lawyer, whom they had brought with them to urge their claims.  Madame Stella Griggs had a ready imagination.  The two stenographers had not spoken at all.  From time to time the prettier wept, softly, in her lace-edged handkerchief; the other looked pale and nervous.  Whenever she looked at Carroll her mouth quivered.  The young man sat still and winked furiously.  He had discovered Carroll’s address and informed the girls, and they had planned this descent upon their employer.  Now they were there, they were frightened and intimidated and distressed.  They were a gentle lot, of the sort that are born to be led.  Their resentment and sense of injustice overwhelmed them with grief, rather than a desire for retaliation.  They were in sore straits for their money, yet all would have walked again into the snare, and they regarded Carroll with the same