Yehudah, however, didn’t notice the mistake. He snorted again, then used his most offhand voice. “Sure,” he replied. His answer made him genuinely proud, as if the man had just asked him whether he had graduated with honors. Still, something about this customer was really getting on his nerves. It was as if the man were judging him, staring at his beard as if he really knew what he was looking at. What he couldn’t see, Yehudah thought, was the beauty of the world hidden beneath the black hat resting on the desk behind him—a world where every moment could be considered holy, a world where your sincerity mattered more than where you went to school or how much you were paid, a world where nothing was considered worse than playing recklessly with someone else’s heart, a world where people knew who they were and didn’t spend years on end deciding it, a world where large numbers of people built entire careers around the academic study of how to be a better person, a world where you didn’t need a medical degree to justify spending every Sunday afternoon visiting strangers in a nursing home. How could this customer stare so hard and still manage not to see a single thing?

No glasses, Jake realized. That was what made this guy seem different. He had never seen a Hassidic man before who didn’t wear glasses.

“So you know how this all feels, huh,” Jake said, smiling a fake smile. Then he panicked for a moment, realizing he might have said the wrong thing again. He glanced at the Mad Hatter’s forehead, where beads of sweat were gathering on the crown of his head like droplets of dew on a leaf. His was probably one of those arranged marriages, Jake thought to himself. The guy probably never even kissed a girl before he got married. If he’s twenty-nine now, he’s probably been married for years on end, with a flock of children too. Still, he thought to himself, there was room for his own comment to make sense—after all, maybe it was just a friendly comment about getting married, not about the ecstasies and agonies of romances or the unbounded, unimagined, unanticipated joy of suddenly, stunningly, being done. Jake felt himself beginning to turn red, wondering what Yehudah would say.

But the Mad Hatter showed no signs of alarm. Instead he smiled back. “Oh, sure,” he laughed. “You think this is tough? Try buying an engagement ring for a girl whose father owns a diamond business. I mean, we’re talking about a girl who’s actually going to recognize a one-and-a-quarter carat, G-class VS1. That was a nightmare I wouldn’t care to repeat.”