mrs. cohn was a pale image of mr. cohn, seeing things through his gold spectacles, and walking humbly in the shadow of his greatness. she had dutifully borne him many children, and sat on the ground for such as died. her figure refused the jewess's tradition of opulency, and remained slender as though repressed. her work was manifold and unceasing, for besides her domestic and shop-womanly duties she was necessarily a philanthropist, fettered with jewish charities as the gabbai's wife, tangled with christian charities as the consort of the town councillor. in speech she was literally his echo, catching up his mistakes, indeed, admonished by him of her slips in speaking the councillor's english. he had had the start of her by five years, for she had been brought from poland to marry him, through the good offices of a friend of hers who saw in her little dowry the nucleus of a thriving shop in a thriving port.
and from this initial inferiority she never recovered—five milestones behind on the road of anglicization! it was enough to keep down a more assertive personality than poor hannah's. the mere danger of slipping back unconsciously to the banned yiddish put a curb upon her tongue. her large, dark eyes had a dog-like look, and they were set pathetically in a sallow face that suggested ill-health, yet immense staying power.
that s. cohn was a bit of a bully can scarcely be denied. it is difficult to combine the offices of gabbai and town councillor without a self-satisfaction that [52]may easily degenerate into dissatisfaction with others. least endurable was s. cohn in his religious rigidity, and he could never understand that pietistic exercises in which he found pleasure did not inevitably produce ecstasy in his son and heir. and when simon was discovered reading 'the pirates of pechili,' dexterously concealed in his prayer-book, the boy received a strapping that made his mother wince. simon's breakfast lay only at the end of a long volume of prayers; and, having ascertained by careful experiment the minimum of time his father would accept for the gabbling of these empty oriental sounds, he had fallen back on penny numbers to while away the hungry minutes. the quartering and burning of these tales in an avenging fireplace was not the least of the reasons why the whipped youth wept, and it needed several pieces of cake, maternally smuggled into his maw while the father's back was turned, to choke his sobs.
