Her voice is just perfect: not
loud and strong, but searching and melting, like the thoughts of what
has been. That is the way old people like me feel a beautiful voice."

But Mrs. Meyrick did not enter into particulars which would have
required her to say that Amy and Mab, who had accompanied Mirah to the
synagogue, found the Jewish faith less reconcilable with their wishes
in her case than in that of Scott's Rebecca. They kept silence out of
delicacy to Mirah, with whom her religion was too tender a subject to
be touched lightly; but after a while Amy, who was much of a practical
reformer, could not restrain a question.

"Excuse me, Mirah, but _does_ it seem quite right to you that the women
should sit behind rails in a gallery apart?"

"Yes, I never thought of anything else," said Mirah, with mild surprise.

"And you like better to see the men with their hats on?" said Mab,
cautiously proposing the smallest item of difference.

"Oh, yes. I like what I have always seen there, because it brings back
to me the same feelings--the feelings I would not part with for
anything else in the world."

After this, any criticism, whether of doctrine or practice, would have
seemed to these generous little people an inhospitable cruelty. Mirah's
religion was of one fibre with her affections, and had never presented
itself to her as a set of propositions.

"She says herself she is a very bad Jewess, and does not half know her
people's religion," said Amy, when Mirah was gone to bed. "Perhaps it
would gradually melt away from her, and she would pass into
Christianity like the rest of the world, if she got to love us very
much, and never found her mother. It is so strange to be of the Jews'
religion now."

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried Mab. "I wish I were not such a hideous Christian.
How can an ugly Christian, who is always dropping her work, convert a
beautiful Jewess, who has not a fault?"

"It may be wicked of me," said shrewd Kate, "but I cannot help wishing
that her mother may not be found. There might be something unpleasant."

"I don't think it, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick. "I believe Mirah is cut
out after the pattern of her mother. And what a joy it would be to her
to have such a daughter brought back again! But a mother's feelings are
not worth reckoning, I suppose" (she shot a mischievous glance at her
own daughters), "and a dead mother is worth more that a living one?"

"Well, and so she may be, little mother," said Kate