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Miss Lazar passed by us, giving me a smiling look, which seemed to say, "I knew you would sooner or later be in her company." I felt myself blushing. "To-morrow I'll be in Tannersville and all this nonsense will be over," I said to myself The long-faced, short girl with whom Miss Tevkin had played tennis emerged from the lobby door and was introduced to me as Miss Siegel.
"Do you know him?" "No, but I have heard of him. You did not include him in your list of notables, did you?" "Oh, well, he was a notable once upon a time. Our rule is, 'Let the dead past bury it's dead." I felt sorry for poor Tevkin. Turning half-way around in my seat, I took to eying the Hebrew poet. I felt disappointed.
When Mrs. Tevkin, the children, and myself were mounting the stairs leading up from the dining-room, I was by Anna's side, my nerves as taut as those of a soldier waiting for the command to charge. I charged sooner than I expected. "Sasha asked the Four Questions," I found myself saying. "There is one question which I should like to ask of you, Miss Tevkin."
She volunteered the further information that the tall girl's father was a writer, and, as though anxious lest I should take him too seriously, she hastened to add: "He doesn't write English, though. It's Jewish, or Hebrew, or something." "What's his name?" I asked "Tevkin," she answered, under her breath The name sounded remotely familiar to me. Had I seen it in some Yiddish paper?
For all our familiarity, it seemed as if we held our conversations through a thick window-pane. Nevertheless, in a very vague way, and for no particular reason that I was aware of, I thought that I sensed encouragement Tevkin never again approached me with his real-estate ventures, but the very air of his house these days was full of such ventures. I met other real-estate men at his home.
"If two or three of the family were missing it wouldn't be so marked," Tevkin supported her, chivalrously. "But only one is missing, only one. That somehow makes you think of him. I feel the same way." As he spoke it seemed to me that in his home atmosphere he bore himself with more self-confidence and repose than at the café or at his office.
Women, too, were ardently dabbling in real estate, and one of them was Mrs. Chaikin, the wife of my talented designer Tevkin was not the first broker to offer me a "good thing" in real estate. Attempts in that direction had been made before and I had warded them all off Instinct told me not to let my attention be diverted from my regular business to what I considered a gamble.
As I picked my way through the crowd I watched Miss Tevkin, who sat between Miss Siegel and one of their cavaliers. Our eyes met, but she hastened to look away "She has certainly made up her mind to shun me," I thought, wretchedly. "She knows I am worth about a million, and yet she does not want to have anything to do with me. Must be a Socialist. The idea of a typewriter girl cutting me! Pooh!
The announcement made something of a stir. Mrs. Wolpert brought us tea. From the ensuing conversation I gleaned that these people, including Tevkin, were ardent Zionists of a certain type, and that they were part of a group in which the poet was a ruling spirit.
Encouraged by this transaction, Tevkin rapidly developed some far-reaching real-estate projects in which he apparently expected me to be the central figure. One afternoon as we sat over glasses of tea at Malbin's he said: "If you want to drink a glass of real Russian tea, come up some evening. We shall all be very glad to see you."
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