But in the evening of the same day she was enlightened.

She was summoned to her elder brother's house, for a conference on the subject of the proposed match, and there she found the young man who had bought the cigarettes.

For my mother's family, if they forced her to marry, were willing to make her path easier by letting her meet the hossen, convinced that she must be won over by his good looks and learned conversation.
It does not really matter how my mother felt, as she sat, with a protecting niece in her lap, at one end of a long table, with the hossen fidgeting at the other end.

The marriage contract would be written anyway, no matter what she thought of the hossen.

And the contract was duly written, in the presence of the assembled families of both parties, after plenty of open discussion, in which everybody except the prospective bride and groom had a voice.
One voice in particular broke repeatedly into the consultations of the parents and the shadchan, and that was the voice of Henne Roesel, one of my father's numerous poor cousins.