The girls were cold and miserable. The boys wrestled and practised feats of strength with each other to keep warm, and looked to their mother for applause. She gave it them mechanically as she sat by the little boy, whom she had laid to sleep on the bedding. He would be hungry, she thought, when he woke up, and she must get him food. There was the money which had been thrown to him, but she did not know its value. People do not throw much money away. At home people do not throw even small money away. There such a thing could not happen. There money, like everything else, avoids the poor. But this was rich England, where it rained money.
When the boy woke up she would go out and buy him something good to eat, and if Mr. Kühler did not come to-morrow she would find some work and a room, or a corner of a room, to live in. Perhaps Jacob had gone to America again. He had been there twice, and both times suddenly. People always went to America suddenly. He went out and bought a clean collar, and said he was going and would send money for her as soon as he had enough. . . . Poor Jacob, he could not endure their poverty and he would not steal, but he would always fight the soldiers and the bailiffs when they came to take the bedding. . . . The sea heaved, and it rained money. The two boys began to fight, a sudden fury in both of them. Their sisters rushed to part them and Mrs. Kühler rose.
At the end of the long room she saw Jacob peering from group to group. He looked white and ill, as he had done when he came again and again to implore her to marry him, and she felt half afraid of him, as she had done when the violent fury of love in him had broken down her resistance and dragged her from her comfortable home to the bare life he had to offer her. He came to her now with the same ungraciousness that had marked his wooing, explained to her that he had just got a job and could not get away to meet her, and turned from her to the children. The boys were grown big and strong, and the eldest girl was a beauty. He was satisfied, stooped and picked up little Mendel in his strong arms. The child woke up, gave a little grunt of pleasure as he recognized the familiar smell of his father, and went to sleep again.