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    THE
    IMPORTED BRIDEGROOM
    AND OTHER STORIES OF
    THE NEW YORK
    GHETTO

    BY

    ABRAHAM CAHAN

  [Illustration]

    BOSTON AND NEW YORK
    HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
    The Riverside Press, Cambridge
    1898




THE IMPORTED BRIDEGROOM




I


Flora was alone in the back parlor, which she had appropriated for a
sort of boudoir. She sat in her rocker, in front of the parlor stove,
absorbed in "Little Dorrit." Her well-groomed girlish form was
enveloped in a kindly warmth whose tender embrace tinged her interest
in the narrative with a triumphant consciousness of the snowstorm
outside.

Little by little the rigid afternoon light began to fade into a
melancholy gray. Dusk was creeping into the room in almost visible
waves. Flora let the book rest on her lap and fixed her gaze on the
twinkling scarlet of the stove-glass. The thickening twilight, the
warmth of the apartment, and the atmosphere of the novel blended
together, and for some moments Flora felt far away from herself.

She was the only girl of her circle who would read Dickens, Scott, or
Thackeray in addition to the "Family Story Paper" and the "Fireside
Companion," which were the exclusive literary purveyors to her former
classmates at the Chrystie Street Grammar School. There were a piano
and a neat little library in her room.

She was rather tall and well formed. Her oblong ivory face,
accentuated by a mass of unruly hair of a lustreless black, was never
deserted by a faint glimmer of a smile, at once pensive and arch. When
she broke into one of her hearty, good-natured laughs, her deep, dark,
appealing eyes would seem filled with grief. Her nose, a trifle too
precipitous, gave an unexpected tone to the extreme picturesqueness of
the whole effect, and, when she walked, partook of the dignity of her
gait.

A month or two before we make Flora's acquaintance she had celebrated
her twentieth birthday, having been born in this little private house
on Mott Street, which was her father's property.

A matchmaker had recently called, and he had launched into a eulogy of
a young Jewish physician; but old Stroon had cut him short, in his
blunt way: his only child was to marry a God-fearing business man, and
no fellow deep in Gentile lore and shaving his beard need apply. As
to Flora, she was burning to be a doctor's wife. A rising young
merchant, a few years in the country, was the staple matrimonial
commodity in her set. Most of her married girl friends, American-born
themselves, like Flora, had husbands of this class--queer fellows,
whose broken English had kept their own sweethearts chuckling. Flora
hated the notion of marrying as the other Mott or Bayard Street girls
did. She was accustomed to use her surroundings for a background,
throwing her own personality into high relief. But apart from this,
she craved a more refined atmosphere than her own, and the vague ideal
she had was an educated American gentleman, like those who lived
up-town.

Accordingly, when the word "doctor" had left the matchmaker's lips,
she seized upon it as a great discovery. In those days--the early
eighties--a match of this kind was an uncommon occurrence in the New
York Ghetto.

Flora pictured a clean-shaven, high-hatted, spectacled gentleman
jumping out of a buggy, and the image became a fixture in her mind. "I
won't marry anybody except a doctor," she would declare, with
conscious avoidance of bad grammar, as it behooved a doctor's wife.

But what was to be done with father's opposition? Asriel Stroon had
never been the man to yield, and now that he grew more devout every
day, her case seemed hopeless. But then Flora was her father's
daughter, and when she took a resolve she could not imagine herself
otherwise than carrying it out, sooner or later.

Flora's thoughts were flowing in this direction when her father's
gruff voice made itself heard from the dining-room below. It was the
anniversary of his father's death. In former years he would have
contented himself with