Indeed, the police, as silent
partners in the profits of their shame, plainly encouraged this vice
traffic. All of which undoubtedly helped to make a profligate of
me, but, of course, it would be preposterous to charge it all, or
even chiefly, to the police
My wild oats were flavored with a sense of my failure as a
business man, by my homesickness and passion for Matilda. My
push-cart bored me. I was hungry for intellectual interest, for
novel sensations. I was restless. Sometimes I would stop from
business in the middle of the day to plunge into a page of Talmud
at some near-by synagogue, and sometimes I would lay down the
holy book in the middle of a sentence and betake myself to the
residence of some fallen woman In my loneliness I would look for
some human element in my acquaintance with these women. I
would ply them with questions about their antecedents, their
family connections, as my mother had done the girl from "That"
Street
As a rule, my questions bored them and their answers were
obvious fabrications, but there were some exceptions
One of these, a plump, handsome, languid-eyed female named
Bertha, occupied two tiny rooms in which she lived with her
ten-year-old daughter.
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