MANASSEH 367
that he's gone, goodness knows where, and come home two hours after everyone else. Where's he loitering about?"
"I don't know," I replied gravely.
The woman brandished her ladle in such a way that I began to think she meant murder.
"You don't know?" she exclaimed with a sinister flash in her eyes. "What do you mean by that? Don't you two leave the shop together? How can you help seeing what becomes of him?"
Then I remembered that when Manasseh and I left the shop, he walked with me a few blocks, and then went off in another direction, and that one day, when I asked him where he was going, he had replied, "To some friends."
"He must go to some friends," I said to the woman.
"To some friends?" she repeated, and burst into strange laughter. "Who? Whose? Ours? We're greeners, we are, we have no friends. What friends should he have, poor, miserable wretch ?"
"I don't know," I said, "but that is what he told me."
"All right !" said Manasseh's wife. "I'll teach him a lesson he won't forget in a hurry."
With these words she departed.
When she had left the room, I pictured to myself poor consumptive Manasseh being taught a "lesson" by his yellow-haired wife, and I pitied him.
Manasseh was a man of about thirty. His yellowish- white face was set in a black beard; he was very thin, always ailing and coughing, had never learnt to write,
