dren were sensuously
concentrated on the funeral and the glory of seeing a vehicle drive away
from their own door. Esther was also disappointed at not seeing her
mother's soul fly up to heaven though she watched vigilantly at the
death-bed for the ascent of the long yellow hook-shaped thing. The
genesis of this conception of the soul was probably to be sought in the
pictorial representations of ghosts in the story-papers brought home by
her eldest brother Benjamin. Strange shadowy conceptions of things more
corporeal floated up from her solitary reading. Theatres she came across
often, and a theatre was a kind of Babel plain or Vanity Fair in which
performers and spectators were promiscuously mingled and wherein the
richer folk clad in evening dress sat in thin deal boxes--the cases in
Spitalfields market being Esther's main association with boxes. One of
her day-dreams of the future was going to the theatre in a night-gown
and being accommodated with an orange-box. Little rectification of such
distorted views of life was to be expected from Moses Ansell, who went
down to his grave without seeing even a circus, and had no interest in
art apart from the "Police News" and his "Mizrach" and the synagogue
decorations. Even when Esther's sceptical instinct drove her to inquire
of her father how people knew that Moses got the Law on Mount Sinai, he
could only repeat in horror that the Books of Moses said so, and could
never be brought to see that his arguments travelled on roundabouts. She
sometimes regretted that her brilliant brother Benjamin had been
swallowed up by the orphan asylum, for she imagined she could have
discussed many a knotty point with him. Solomon was both flippant and
incompetent. But in spite of her theoretical latitudinarianism, in
practice she was pious to the point of fanaticism and could scarce
conceive the depths of degradation of which she heard vague
horror-struck talk. There were Jews about--grown-up men and women, not
insane--who struck lucifer matches on the Sabbath and housewives who
carelessly mixed their butter-plates with their meat-plates even when
they did not actually eat butter with meat. Esther promised herself
that, please God, she would never do anything so wicked when she grew
up. She at least would never fail to light the Sabbath candles nor to
_kasher_ the meat. Never was child more alive to the beauty of duty,
more open to the appeal of virtue, self-control, abnegation. She fasted