A room high up in a swarming tenement had been the grave of her youth
and pleasure. She was as solitary there as she could have been in a
desert, for the neighbours who had known and assisted her in the first
years of her bereavement had died or moved to that Mecca of the New
World, Harlem. And their successors were not kindly disposed towards
a family comprising a silent man, a half-grown girl, and two twin
demons who made the block a terror to the nervous and the stairs a
menace to the unwary. No one came to gossip with Leah. She was too
young to listen understandingly to older women's adventures in sickness
or domestic infelicity, and too dispirited to make any show of interest
in the toilettes or "affaires" of the younger. For what were incompetent
doctors, habit-backed dresses, wavering husbands, or impetuous lovers
to Leah Yonowsky, who had assumed all the responsibilities of a woman's
life with none of its consolations?

Of course she had, to some extent, failed in the upbringing of her
brothers, but she had always looked forward hopefully to the time when
they should be old enough to be sent to school. There they should
learn, among much other lore, to live up to the names she had selected
for them out of the book of love and of adventure which she had been
reading at the time of their baptism. During all the years of her
enslavement she had been a patron of the nearest public library, and
it had been a source of great disappointment to her that Algernon and
Percival had made no least attempt to acquire the grace of speech and
manner which she had learned to associate with those lordly titles.

And now they were refusing even to approach the Pierian Spring! "I
guess I don't go," Algernon was persisting. "I guess I plays on the
street."