“Leave our address for Herr Vanderlyn?” said Kreutzer, who had been waiting for the question and had schooled himself to answer it without revealing the real facts.  “Of course.  Of course.  Why not?” It was the first time he had ever actually lied to Anna.  Things, thus, were in a bad way at the start in the new quarters.

M’riar, after the first day there, did the marketing.  The streets, transformed into deep, narrow canons by the towering buildings bordering them, swarming with the poor of every nationality on earth, every block made into a most fascinating market by the push-cart vendors with their varied wares, had, from the start, enthralled her.  She was uncannily acute at bargaining.  Soon more than one red-headed Jew had learned, in self-defense, to take out the stick which held up one end of his cart, and move along, at sight of her.  Too often she had been the symbol of financial loss.  Her “Hi sye!” and “My heye!” became the keen delight of German maidens back of counters over which cheap delicatessen was distributed.

Beyond a doubt M’riar was in her element.  She labored day and night.  Few tasks there were about the tiny three-room menage, save the actual cooking, which she did not undertake and undertake with energy which made up, largely, for her lack of skill.  Herr Kreutzer, who had been in doubt about the wisdom of engrafting her upon his little family looked at her with amazement, sometimes lowering his flute, on which he might be practicing, in the very middle of a bar, so that he might better stare at her unbounded and unceasing physical activities.  She abandoned, as unworthy of her mistress, her old form of address and no longer simply called her “Miss,” but “Frow-line,” after tutelage from the small shop-woman who sold cheese to her in three-cent packages.

But, ere much time had passed, the day arrived when Herr Kreutzer feared to have her even buy so much of luxury as cheese in three-cent packages.  The little bag of money which had chinked so bravely on his hip when he had first arrived in New York city scarcely chinked at all, these days.  Everything was so expensive in this new land they had come to!  Not only must he pay as much rent for a three-room tenement, with one room almost dark and one quite windowless, as he had had to pay, in London, for the comfortable floor which they had occupied in Soho, but food cost twice as much, he woefully declared—­and played the “Miserere” on his flute.  He would not go to Karrosch, or any of the large, important orchestras; none of the small ones wished a flutist.  He learned to loathe the mere word “phonograph”—­in so many places did it form a clock-work substitute to do the work he longed to do.

It was when want actually stared them in the face that he read an advertisement in a German newspaper for a musician—­flute or clarinet—­in a beer garden.  The clock-hands had not yet reached eight when he presented himself at the address, far uptown.  He had been unsuccessful, once or twice, in getting hearings because he had arrived too late—­these days he rose by four and had a paper fresh and damp from the great presses, and every advertisement in it read by five o’clock.