THEODORE ROOSEVELT HYMAN
15
President Teddy Roosevelt Hyman? Why not? A jew had been prime
minister in England; and the prime minister was greater than a king.
A president? Let it be laughed at, let it be a jest today. It had happened,
often enough, that the jest of one day become the reality of another. And
in America, rich expanding America, was anything impossible?
The brandy bottle passed from hand to hand, was emptied, refilled,
emptied, refilled again.
The heaps of nut cakes
I[J
the plates were .re-
duced to layers of crumbs. The crowd began to drift away. One of the
great days in the lives of the Hymans was over; soon there would be the
brith;
then the decline into the humdrum.
But not altogether.
The
swelling consciousness of strength continued and grew.
The Nation was
expanding and its atoms, with it. Prices went up, hopes sent up, the na-
tion was soon to reach down to Panama and stretch beyond and cross its
legs on the Andes.
And business would swell into trusts and America
would adopt an international swagger. And in almost evey househould, in
spite of poverty and torment and insecurity, there would be a spasm of the
imperial consciousness. From the marble offices in \Vashington it would
be radiated into all the households, schoolrooms, and workshops of the
land. For most it would be a hope only; but to a few it would be a
reality; and they would seize and gather in and bloat their possessions into
incalculable fortunes.
And nowhere was this hope stronger than in the slums, where im-
migrants, moving into a new world, found it in motion, found it to be a
world in the process of enlargeme!1t.
In the Hymans'
household the added child proved just enough to
burst the old tightness.
Joseph soon got over his glory of being another
uncle. He boarded where he could get some sleep.
And Harry went
elsewhere, cunningly deciding that he would fare better with Rebecca if
he could oblige her to see him sometimes, outside the house.
Only Rebecca remained and she, out of a sense of duty, to help Sarah,
who remained unaccountably weak after her delivery.
The house should
have felt roomier, but even were Sarah and Morris left alone there, they
would have felt cramped.
For now, their new sense of well-being de-
manded a new setting.
They were not contented with their nooks in the
slum.
One Sunday Morris stayed away the entire afternoon.
When he
returned in the evening his eyes were elated with excitement.
He had
rented a new apartment in Harlem.
Harlem was roomy and clean. There
were great stretches of empty lots. There was grass on the ground to
be seen from the sidewalk, from one's window.
The air was clean.
It
was almost like being in the country.
The house itself was new; you
