"
Both of them, the Jew and the Jewess, were by birth from Homel,
and must have been created by God himself for a tender,
passionate, mutual love; but many circumstances--as, for example,
the pogrom which took place in their town, impoverishment, a
complete confusion, fright--had for a time parted them. However,
love was so great that the junior drug clerk Neiman, with great
difficulty, efforts, and humiliations, contrived to find for
himself the place of a junior in one of the local pharmacies, and
had searched out the girl he loved. He was a real, orthodox
Hebrew, almost fanatical. He knew that Sonka had been sold by her
very mother to one of the buyers-up of live merchandise, knew many
humiliating, hideous particulars of how she had been resold from
hand to hand, and his pious, fastidious, truly Hebraic soul
writhed and shuddered at these thoughts, but nevertheless love was
above all. And every evening he would appear in the drawing room
of Anna Markovna. If he was successful, at an enormous
deprivation, in cutting out of his beggarly income some chance
rouble, he would take Sonka into her room, but this was not at all
a joy either for him or for her: after a momentary happiness--the
physical possession of each other--they cried, reproached each
other, quarreled with characteristic Hebraic, theatrical gestures,
and always after these visits Sonka the Rudder would return into
the drawing room with swollen, reddened eyelids.
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