A free spirit, and what an optimist. Ester was delighted by this: so many people she had known in her ‘old life’, as she called it, had been so determined to be realists, to be dull and staid and grey. They looked at her new life like that, too, realistically saw it a fall. But Judah understood better than they that it wasn’t a fall at all, not when there were so many positives from this freedom, more than the flaws of poverty and living amongst lowlifes. The lowlifes were more fun than anyone gave them credit for, and poverty wouldn’t last.

Young Mr. Holt might gain back a fortune if he became the next Beethoven, who knew. “I bet you saw every opera and orchestra in the city when you were young,” Ester said dreamily, picturing Judah younger, in the sort of upper-class family where his parents had probably educated him in everything, had hoped to help fulfil all his dreams. Perhaps he found the old days still too painful to talk about, she wasn’t sure, but Ester had never had a filter, so she kept asking questions anyway. “Were you a real musical prodigy, even as a boy?”

She did love an artistic genius.

---