The cold from the windows laid metallic ribbons across my back. I was sickened to think of my aunts and uncles trudging, whimpering, in the Russian night, and in a glow of relief at my better fortune, I grasped the extended hand. In a meditative way, with his head bowed, my father began to finger my hand, pressing the ball of his into the hollow of my palm, lacing our fingers together, feeling the knuckles.

“Sonie,” he said after a time. “What is it you want to do when you grow up?”

I could not tell him that my only ambition was to live with Miss Pride, for I did not want him to know that I preferred her to himself. But I said, “I guess I want to live in Boston.”

“Boston? Is that all you want to do? Why, I thought you wanted to be a school teacher at least.”

“Oh, no!”

“I guess I haven’t done anything right. You should want to be a school teacher, I think. How far are you in your Latin now?”

“We don’t start Latin till the eighth grade,” I told him and then, because I saw how curiously he looked at me, I added, “I’m in the seventh now.”

“It would be a comfort for a man to know what he used to know,” he mused. Then, to include me he said with a spurt of good spirits, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Sonie, we’ll go west some day to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Wouldn’t you like to ride a little wild horse?”

I said I would in much sincerity, but because I was unschooled in both the scenery and the customs of the west, I did not immediately seat myself astride a horse or envisage Cheyenne, but instead, heard Miss Pride say to a friend, as I entered the drawing room, “Here is our cow girl. You know she and her father own several thousand wild roan stallions.”

“I could make us some boots.” He said that undoubtedly there was a place for a man like him who could make leather things. Cowboys were particular about their clothes, he had heard; that is, not dandified, but they liked expensive wool shirts and Stetson hats and since they hadn’t for the most part any family to support, they could spend all their wages on clothes and Schnaps. He dwelt for a long time on their emancipation and prosperity; sometimes, for variety, he called them “the punchers” until I became quite breathless and pleaded to go at once.

I returned him from his rapture. He looked down at me through the sad gloom. “Well, now, Mädchen, when will you be ready to go?”