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"If everybody were to talk like you Leah Volcovitch would never be married at all." Leibel shrugged his shoulders, and reminded him that hunchbacked girls who stammered and squinted and halted on left legs were not usually led under the canopy. "Nonsense! Stuff!" cried Sugarman, angrily. "That is because they do not come to me."
"Your talk has neither face nor figure," answered Sugarman, sternly. "It is just the people one sees every day that one knows least. I warrant that if I had not put it into your head you would never have dreamt of Leibel as a son-in-law. Come now, confess." Eliphaz grunted vaguely, and the Shadchan went on triumphantly: "I thought as much.
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.
The landing outside the workshop was so badly lighted that their lips came together in the darkness. "Nay, nay; thou must not yet," said Rose. "Thou art still courting Leah Volcovitch. For aught thou knowest, Sugarman the Shadchan may have entangled thee beyond redemption." "Not so," asserted Leibel. "I have only seen the maiden once." "Yes.
After all, it is a cheek of you to aspire so high. As you told me from the first, you haven't saved a penny. Even my commission you won't be able to pay till you get the dowry. But if I go I do not despair of getting a substantial sum to say nothing of the daughter." "Yes, I think you had better go," said Leibel, eagerly.
"She is on my list. Her father gave her to me some months ago, but he is hard to please. Even the maiden herself is not easy, being pretty." "Perhaps she has waited for some one," suggested Leibel. Sugarman's keen ear caught the note of complacent triumph. "You have been asking her yourself!" he exclaimed, in horror-stricken accents. "And if I have?" said Leibel, defiantly. "You have cheated me!
"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.
"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?
"Do not give in, Leibel!" she said. "Do not have me! Do not let them persuade thee! By my life, thou must not! Go home!" So at the eleventh minute the vanquished Eliphaz produced the balance, and they all lived happily ever afterward. AN IDYL OF LONDON, By Beatrice Harraden
And then arose a hubbub of voices, a chaos of suggestions; friends rushed to and fro between the camps, some emerging from their seats in the synagogue to add to the confusion. But Eliphaz had taken his stand upon a rock he had no more ready money. To-morrow, the next day, he would have some. And Leibel, pale and dogged, clutched tighter at those machines that were slipping away momently from him.
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