Her complexion was fair and her manner lymphatic, and if she was not so well-favored as her sister, she was more amiable and pleasant.

She could sing sweetly in Yiddish and in English, and had once been a pantomime fairy at ten shillings a week, and had even flourished a cutlass as a midshipman.

But she had long since given up the stage, to become her father's right hand woman in the workshop.

She made coats from morning till midnight at a big machine with a massive treadle, and had pains in her chest even before she fell in love with Pesach Weingott.
There was a hubbub of congratulation (_Mazzoltov, Mazzoltov_, good luck), and a palsy of handshaking, when the contract was signed.
Remarks, grave and facetious, flew about in Yiddish, with phrases of Polish and Russian thrown in for auld lang syne, and cups and jugs were broken in reminder of the transiency of things mortal.

The Belcovitches had been saving up their already broken crockery for the occasion.