“But she halts on the left leg,” cried Leibel, exasperated.

“Gott in Himmel! Do you mean to say you do not see what an advantage it is to have a wife unable to accompany you in all your goings?”

Leibel lost patience.

“Why, the girl is a hunchback!” he protested, furiously.

“My dear Leibel,” said the marriage broker, deprecatingly shrugging his shoulders and spreading out his palms, “you can’t expect perfection!”

Nevertheless Leibel persisted in his unreasonable attitude.  He accused Sugarman of wasting his time, of making a fool of him.

“A fool of you!” echoed the Shadchan, indignantly, “when I give you a chance of a boot and shoe manufacturer’s daughter?  You will make a fool of yourself if you refuse.  I dare say her dowry would be enough to set you up as a master tailor.  At present you are compelled to slave away as a cutter for thirty shillings a week.  It is most unjust.  If you only had a few machines you would be able to employ your own cutters.  And they can be got so cheap nowadays.”

This gave Leibel pause, and he departed without having definitely broken the negotiations.  His whole week was befogged by doubt, his work became uncertain, his chalk marks lacked their usual decision, and he did not always cut his coat according to his cloth.  His aberrations became so marked that pretty Rose Green, the sweater’s eldest daughter, who managed a machine in the same room, divined, with all a woman’s intuition, that he was in love.

“What is the matter?” she said, in rallying Yiddish, when they were taking their lunch of bread and cheese and ginger-beer amid the clatter of machines, whose serfs had not yet knocked off work.

“They are proposing me a match,” he answered, sullenly.

“A match!” ejaculated Rose.  “Thou!” She had worked by his side for years, and familiarity bred the second person singular.  Leibel nodded his head, and put a mouthful of Dutch cheese into it.

“With whom?” asked Rose.  Somehow he felt ashamed.  He gurgled the answer into the stone ginger-beer bottle, which he put to his thirsty lips.

“With Leah Volcovitch!”

“Leah Volcovitch!” gasped Rose.  “Leah, the boot and shoe manufacturer’s daughter?”

Leibel hung his head—­he scarce knew why.  He did not dare meet her gaze.  His droop said “Yes.”  There was a long pause.

“And why dost thou not have her?” said Rose.  It was more than an inquiry; there was contempt in it, and perhaps even pique.

Leibel did not reply.  The embarrassing silence reigned again, and reigned long.  Rose broke it at last.

“Is it that thou likest me better?” she asked.

Leibel seemed to see a ball of lightning in the air; it burst, and he felt the electric current strike right through his heart.  The shock threw his head up with a jerk, so that his eyes gazed into a face whose beauty and tenderness were revealed to him for the first time.  The face of his old acquaintance had vanished; this was a cajoling, coquettish, smiling face, suggesting undreamed-of things.