On the left of the somewhat seedy Strelitski pretty Bessie in blue silk presided over the coffee-pot.

Nobody knew whence Bessie had stolen her good looks: probably some remote ancestress! Bessie was in every way the most agreeable member of the family, inheriting some of her father's brains, but wisely going for the rest of herself to that remote ancestress.
Gabriel Hamburg and Joseph Strelitski had both had relations with No.

1 Royal Street for some time, yet they had hardly exchanged a word and their meeting at this breakfast table found them as great strangers as though they had never seen each other.

Strelitski came because he boarded with the Sugarmans, and Hamburg came because he sometimes consulted Jonathan Sugarman about a Talmudical passage.

Sugarman was charged with the oral traditions of a chain of Rabbis, like an actor who knows all the "business" elaborated by his predecessors, and even a scientific scholar like Hamburg found him occasionally and fortuitously illuminating.