essie loved Daniel. Only Bessie did not speak because
she was a woman and Daniel did not speak because he was a man. They were
a quiet family--the Hyamses. They all bore their crosses in a silence
unbroken even at home. Miriam herself, the least reticent, did not give
the impression that she could not have husbands for the winking. Her
demands were so high--that was all. Daniel was proud of her and her
position and her cleverness and was confident she would marry as well as
she dressed. He did not expect her to contribute towards the expenses of
the household--though she did--for he felt he had broad shoulders. He
bore his father and mother on those shoulders, semi-invalids both. In
the bold bad years of shameless poverty, Hyams had been a wandering
metropolitan glazier, but this open degradation became intolerable as
Miriam's prospects improved. It was partly for her sake that Daniel
ultimately supported his parents in idleness and refrained from
speaking to Bessie. For he was only an employe in a fancy-goods
warehouse, and on forty-five shillings a week you cannot keep up two
respectable establishments.

Bessie was a bonnie girl and could not in the nature of things be long
uncaught. There was a certain night on which Daniel did not
sleep--hardly a white night as our French neighbors say; a tear-stained
night rather. In the morning he was resolved to deny himself Bessie.
Peace would be his instead. If it did not come immediately he knew it
was on the way. For once before he had struggled and been so rewarded.
That was in his eighteenth year when he awoke to the glories of free
thought, and knew himself a victim to the Moloch of the Sabbath, to
which fathers sacrifice their children. The proprietor of the fancy
goods was a Jew, and moreover closed on Saturdays. But for this
anachronism of keeping Saturday holy when you had Sunday also to laze
on, Daniel felt a hundred higher careers would have been open to him.
Later, when free thought waned (it was after Daniel had met Bessie),
although he never returned to his father's narrowness, he found the
abhorred Sabbath sanctifying his life. It made life a conscious
voluntary sacrifice to an ideal, and the reward was a touch of
consecration once a week. Daniel could not have described these things,
nor did he speak of them, which was a pity. Once and once only in the
ferment of free thought he had uncorked his soul, and it had run over
with much froth, and thenceforward old Me