Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/146

they were strengthening their roots in this new world which they had learned to love the moment they had set foot upon it.

Monique had grown to be a beauty, enchanting friend and stranger alike, and mother and father were quick to decide that before they brought the child to Paris they would have to move from the ghetto-like Jewish section where they lived, and give their daughter the opportunity to make the right connections, the desirable contacts in a better environment. It did not take long for them to dispose of their old clothes business, open a shop of ready-to-wear clothes, and begin to live like "better class people."

Almost at once Monique had been besieged by a host of admirers, among them doctors, manufacturers, men of importance. Yet Monique had fallen in love with a bank clerk and had married him against her parents' wishes. It hadn't taken her long, though, to see her mistake, and she'd left her husband and returned to her parents.

"The child is young," the mother and father had told one another. "She's learned her lesson, and now she will know." But imperiously Monique had followed her own wilful ways, and her parents could only watch in wonder, as the hen which has hatched a duck stares in amazement while the little awkward creature takes to the water. So did these heartsick parents watch their daughter-unable to find in themselves the courage to warn or remonstrate.

Little Mary, the Levitan niece from Warsaw, was also, left high and dry by the disruption of the family. She, too, felt a pang of regret. At the home of her aunt in Warsaw, whenever anything would happen, there'd always be a tumult of excitement and running around. But here, people went about their business cold-blooded as fish; you could never tell what was happening. In Warsaw, if a cousin of hers had