by an automaton, and could only be remembered later by their desolate banality. One always remembered her as saying as one entered: “… Hello!… You’re becoming quite a strangeh!… It’s been some time since you was around, hasn’t it?… I was thinkin’the otheh day it had been some time since you was around…. I’d begun to think you had forgotten us…. Well, how’ve you been? Lookin’the same as usual, I see…. Me?… Oh, can’t complain…. Keepin’busy? I’ll say! I manage to keep goin’…. Who you lookin’for? Father? He’s in there…. Why, yeah! Go right on in.”
This was Miss Brill, and at the moment that she bent to unfasten her galoshes, it is likely that Mr. Samuel Friedman would also be there in the act of rubbing his small dry hands briskly together, or of rubbing the back of one hand with the palm of the other in order to induce circulation. He was a small youngish man, a pale somewhat meagre-looking little Jew with a sharp ferret face: he, too, was a person who goes to “fill in” those vast swarming masses of people along the pavements and in the subway—the mind cannot remember them or absorb the details of their individual appearance, but they people the earth, they make up life. Mr. Friedman had none of the richness, colour, and humour that some members of his race so abundantly possess; the succession of grey days, the grim weather seemed to have entered his soul as it enters the souls of many different races there—the Irish, the older New England stock, even the Jews—and it gives them a common touch that is prim, drab, careful, tight and sour. Mr. Friedman also wore galoshes, his clothes were neat, drab, a little worn and shiny, there was an odour of thawing dampness and warm rubber about him as he rubbed his dry little hands saying: “Chee! How I hated to leave that good wahm bed this morning! When I got up I said, 'Holy Chee!’My wife says,’Whatsa mattah?’I says,’Holy Chee! You step out heah a moment where I am an’you’ll see whatsa mattah.’'Is it cold?’she says.’Is it cold! I’ll tell the cock-eyed wuhld!’I says. Chee! You could have cut the frost with an axe: the wateh in the pitchehs was frozen hahd; an’she has the nuhve to ask me if it’s cold! Is it cold!’I says.’Do you know any more funny stories?’I says. Oh, how I do love my bed! Chee! I kept thinkin’of that guy in Braintree I got to go see today an’the more I thought about him, the less I liked him! I thought my feet would tu’n into two blocks of ice before I got the funniss stahted!’Chee! I hope the ole bus is still workin’,’I says. If I’ve got to go thaw that damned thing out,’I says,’I'm ready to quit.’Chee! Well, suh, I neveh
