The grandmother, imported from Poland, did not take kindly to her son's wife, whom she found wanting in the minutiae of ceremonial piety and godless enough to wear her own hair.
There had been, indeed, a note of scepticism, of defiance, in Esther's mother, a hankering after the customs of the heathen, which her grandmother divined instinctively and resented for the sake of her son and the post-mundane existence of her grandchildren.

Mrs.Ansell's scepticism based itself upon the uncleanliness which was so generally next to godliness in the pious circles round them, and she had been heard to express contempt for the learned and venerable Israelite, who, being accosted by an acquaintance when the shadows of eve were beginning to usher in the Day of Atonement, exclaimed: "For heaven's sake, don't stop me--I missed my bath last year." Mrs.Ansell bathed her children from head to foot once a month, and even profanely washed them on the Sabbath, and had other strange, uncanny notions.

She professed not to see the value to God, man or beast of the learned Rabbonim, who sat shaking themselves all day in the _Beth Hamidrash_, and said they would be better occupied in supporting their families, a view which, though mere surface blasphemy on the part of the good woman and primarily intended as a hint to Moses to study less and work longer, did not fail to excite lively passages of arms between the two women.

But death ended these bickerings and the _Bube_, who had frequently reproached her son for bringing her into such an atheistic country, was left a drag the more upon the family deprived at once of a mother and a bread-winner.

Old Mrs.Ansell was unfit: for anything save grumbling, and so the headship naturally devolved upon Esther, whom her mother's death left a woman getting on for eight.