ting_]
You, too, Miss Revendal----?
[_Re-enters._]
Oh, David, you have driven away all your friends.

DAVID [_Going to window and looking after VERA_]
Not all, uncle. Not all.
[_He throws his arms boyishly round his uncle._]
I am so happy.

MENDEL
Happy?

DAVID
She loves me--Vera loves me.

MENDEL
Vera?

DAVID
Miss Revendal.

MENDEL
Have you lost your wits?
[_He throws DAVID off._]

DAVID
I don't wonder you're amazed. Maybe you think _I_ wasn't. It is as if an
angel should stoop down----

MENDEL [_Hoarsely_]
This is true? This is not some stupid _Purim_ joke?

DAVID
True and sacred as the sunrise.

MENDEL
But you are a Jew!

DAVID
Yes, and just think! She was bred up to despise Jews--her father was a
Russian baron----

MENDEL
If she was the daughter of fifty barons, you cannot marry her.

DAVID [_In pained amaze_]
Uncle!
[_Slowly_]
Then your hankering after the synagogue was serious after all.

MENDEL
It is not so much the synagogue--it is the call of our blood through
immemorial generations.

DAVID
_You_ say that! You who have come to the heart of the Crucible, where
the roaring fires of God are fusing our race with all the others.

MENDEL [_Passionately_]
Not _our_ race, not your race and mine.

DAVID
What immunity has our race?
[_Meditatively_]
The pride and the prejudice, the dreams and the sacrifices, the
traditions and the superstitions, the fasts and the feasts, things noble
and things sordid--they must all into the Crucible.

MENDEL [_With prophetic fury_]
The Jew has been tried in a thousand fires and only tempered and
annealed.

DAVID
Fires of hate, not fires of love. That is what melts.

MENDEL [_Sneeringly_]
So I see.

DAVID
Your sneer is false. The love that melted me was not Vera's--it was the
love _America_ showed me--the day she gathered me to her breast.

MENDEL [_Speaking passionately and rapidly_]
Many countries have gathered us. Holland took us when we were driven
from Spain--but we did not become Dutchmen. Turkey took us when Germany
oppressed us, but we have not become Turks.

DAVID
These countries were not in the making. They were old civilisations
stamped with the seal of creed. In such countries the Jew may be right
to stand out. But here in this new secular Republic we must look
forward----

MENDEL [_Passionately interrupting_]
We must look backwards, too.

DAVID [_Hysterically_]
To what? To Kishineff?
[