‘But he’s got customers for four blocks around.’

‘The Front has members four blocks around, too. They’ll fix it so he don’t make a penny a day.’

‘I doubt it. Most people aren’t going to walk ten blocks to a candy store just to spite him.’

‘They’ll walk a mile if it gets so they’re ashamed to be seen coming out of his store.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Well doubt it, but I’m telling you it happens. In Los Angeles they were fixing Jews that way right and left.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure. Just like you’re not buying from him on the corner.’

‘Yes, but … well I’m not staying away because anybody told me to.’

‘Why then?’

‘Well, I just don’t get along with the man, that’sail.’

‘You got along with him before the Front started saying not to get along with him, didn’t you?’

‘Well, no, I …’ He lost his thought. Was it possible he was doing exactly what they had forced him to do? At the moment he could not recall just when he had decided not to buy there any more.

‘That’s the way it works,’ she said. ‘People just don’t think it’s healthy to buy from him and pretty soon he’s out. The thing I don’t understand is, why you don’t go in to Fred and tell him where you stand and get this thing cleared up. We’re suffering for no good reason. I don’t understand why you don’t do it.’

‘Because I … well, I don’t believe that Finkelstein is going to move until they beat him so badly that he can’t do anything else but close up.’

‘So?’

‘Well … I don’t know if that’s a right thing to do. I mean I don’t know if I want to get mixed up in that.’

‘Yeh, but if they know where you stand you got nothing to worry about.’

‘But I mean, is it right for them to beat up Finkelstein?’

‘Well, he’s asking for it, isn’t he ? They warned him time and again to get out.’

‘I know, but …’

‘When a man is warned it ain’t as though they jumped on him without warning.’

‘You don’t understand what I mean,’ he explained. ‘I’m wondering whether it’s right for them to take it upon themselves even to warn him.’

‘Well … what do you mean?’

‘I mean … well, take us, for instance. I guess you might say we were warned. Twice, as a matter of fact …’

‘Yeh, that’s why I say go in to Fred.’

‘Wait a minute, let me finish. You’ve got to look at both sides. We were warned. Now do you feel they have a right to tell us where to live?’

‘Yeh, but we’re not Jews, are we?’

He could not press the argument. He did not know how to make her understand, and he felt then that he had become strange in his thinking, that no one but he could imagine such a way of seeing the thing. She was talking …