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you meant by this kind of a date. He switched the conversation to the subject of his job, and he discovered that Sally had never been to a music hall.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜You know why,’ she said. ‘Of course you do. Young ladies don’t go to such places.’
    Max didn’t contest this statement by mentioning the number of girls he saw in the theatre each night. Much of his interest in Sally Levine derived from his concept of her as a person from another world, and if in her world young women did not go to music halls, Max was delighted to accept that. Still and all, he worked in a music hall.
    â€˜Just once,’ he said. ‘I mean, you might just want to come out of curiosity. I don’t think there’s anything there that would offend you.’
    â€˜Perhaps some other time.’
    â€˜But I got you a ticket for tonight. It’s the best seat in the house.’
    â€˜Oh, no. I couldn’t.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Alone? Max, how could I go in there alone?’
    â€˜You won’t be alone. I mean, I’m not sitting next to you, I’m up on the stage, but nobody’s going to bother you. Maybe you think a music hall is some kind of a sinful, terrible place. It ain’t. Families go there.’
    She shook her head.
    â€˜Please. Look, we go on, me and Bert, fifteen or twenty minutes after the show starts. There’s just a long dog act and then we’re on. So all you’d have to spend there is maybe forty-five minutes, and then I change and pick you up, and you said yourself how did I learn to do what I do, when I had no experience or training.’
    â€˜Well …’ She was wavering. ‘You would take me in? I wouldn’t have to go in alone?’
    â€˜Absolutely. And then I come around and you leave with me. I got you an aisle seat in the fourth row, so there’s no problem. And then I got two and a half hours before the next show, so we can have a cup of coffee, and if you want to I’ll bring my partner, Bert, along, and then I take you home.’
    She was torn between curiosity and the conventions. Ever since she had left her secure, peaceful home, the little frame house in Flatbush where she had been born and had grown to maturity, convention had been her shield and protector. Her father and mother had come to America from Vienna a few years after the Civil War. They were Jewish, but, as they saw themselves, a very different breed from these Eastern European Jews who were pouring into America by the thousands and had become a seething mass of slum-ghetto humanity in New York City’s Lower East Side. Sally had gone into this ghetto full of trepidation; this was the jungle, but it was also a wonderland and a place where all things were possible; and while the Lower East Side was only miles from Flatbush geographically, culturally it was a world away. In Brooklyn, there was no Washington Square, no Madison Square, the two incredible and marvelous centers of wealth, culture, and excitement that had turned New York into a rival of London.
    Convention-bound and insecure Sally might be, but she was no frightened mouse, and when they arrived at the Bijou Theatre, Sally felt a delicious flutter of excitement. There had been boys who came calling to the house in Flatbush, but they were stodgy, stolid creatures, destined for law or medicine or Wall Street in the best German-Jewish tradition. There had been no one like Max, no one with that air of wildness and daring, and since she had been living and teaching in New York, she had had no dates until Max appeared. Though New York City teemed with men, Sally had no idea how to meet them, and most of the other teachers at the school were women. Thus it was very exciting to be here at night, in all the lights and bustle of West Broadway, with painted women – whom she labeled as streetwalkers – and flashily dressed men all about her, and the pushcarts and the hawkers and the