As a usual thing—­and this happened often—­Zociya the housekeeper would walk up to him under cover of the hubbub and would say, twisting her lips: 

“Well, what are you sitting there for mister?  Warming your behind?  You might go and pass the time with the young lady.”

Both of them, the Jew and the Jewess, were by birth from Homel, and must have been created by God himself for a tender, passionate, mutual love; but many circumstances—­as, for example, the pogrom which took place in their town, impoverishment, a complete confusion, fright—­had for a time parted them.  However, love was so great that the junior drug clerk Neiman, with great difficulty, efforts, and humiliations, contrived to find for himself the place of a junior in one of the local pharmacies, and had searched out the girl he loved.  He was a real, orthodox Hebrew, almost fanatical.  He knew that Sonka had been sold by her very mother to one of the buyers-up of live merchandise, knew many humiliating, hideous particulars of how she had been resold from hand to hand, and his pious, fastidious, truly Hebraic soul writhed and shuddered at these thoughts, but nevertheless love was above all.  And every evening he would appear in the drawing room of Anna Markovna.  If he was successful, at an enormous deprivation, in cutting out of his beggarly income some chance rouble, he would take Sonka into her room, but this was not at all a joy either for him or for her:  after a momentary happiness—­the physical possession of each other—­they cried, reproached each other, quarreled with characteristic Hebraic, theatrical gestures, and always after these visits Sonka the Rudder would return into the drawing room with swollen, reddened eyelids.

But most frequently of all he had no money, and would sit whole evenings through near his mistress, patiently and jealously awaiting her when Sonka through chance was taken by some guest.  And when she would return and sit down beside him, he would, without being perceived, overwhelm her with reproaches, trying not to turn the general attention upon himself and without turning his head in her direction.  And in her splendid, humid, Hebraic eyes during these conversations there was always a martyr-like but meek expression.

There arrived a large company of Germans, employed in an optical shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the Yamas—­both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the bald spots:  Nicky the Book-keeper and Mishka the Singer—­so were they both called in the houses.  They also were met very cordially, just like Karl Karlovich of the optical shop and Volodka of the fish store—­with raptures, cries and kisses, flattering to their self-esteem.  The spry Niurka would jump out into the foyer, and, having informed herself as to who had come, would report excitedly, after her wont: 

    “Jennka, your husband has come!”