CHAPTER VIII
THE DIVINE CARLOTTA
Of precisely the same height were Sally Fell and Rosey Cohen, but as different in habitat and appearance as a fallow deer and a gayly-striped zebra. Rosey was a daughter of the slums, a foster child of the cafés. Her first cry—even in that hour it was harsh and forceful—was heard in a close room behind a fire-escape draped with a vari-coloured bed-cling, one of a thousand such crude balconies ranging above the crowded East Side street and its jostling many-tongued thousands.
Her father usually stood with his skull-cap and wide flaring beard in the doorway of the Kosher shop, decorated with ugly dark red lumps of beef and scrawny fowl, hanging pathetically with their heads downward. In front of the store, and in and out of the interminable pushcarts, with their flaring oil-lamps at night illuminating a bewildering miscellany of merchandise,—everything from spoiled grapefruit to slimsy suspenders, Rosey played and fought and bit her way. In her life there were two bright recurring episodes,—the visits to the gallery of the Grand Street Theater where the adipose Adler, pride of the Jewish race, stalked the boards, and the wandering hurdy-gurdy, to which
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