explained Sidney, "for you
never see anything to make the audience laugh. I appeal to Mr. Montagu
Samuels."

"It is useless discussing a subject with a man who admittedly speaks
without knowledge," replied that gentleman with dignity.

"Well, how do you expect me to get the knowledge?" grumbled Sidney. "You
exclude the public from your gatherings. I suppose to prevent their
rubbing shoulders with the swells, the privilege of being snubbed by
whom is the reward of public service. Wonderfully practical idea
that--to utilize snobbery as a communal force. The United Synagogue is
founded on it. Your community coheres through it."

"There you are scarcely fair," said the hostess with a charming smile of
reproof. "Of course there are snobs amongst us, but is it not the same
in all sects?"

"Emphatically not," said Sidney. "If one of our swells sticks to a shred
of Judaism, people seem to think the God of Judah should be thankful,
and if he goes to synagogue once or twice a year, it is regarded as a
particular condescension to the Creator."

"The mental attitude you caricature is not so snobbish as it seems,"
said Raphael Leon, breaking into the conversation for the first time.
"The temptations to the wealthy and the honored to desert their
struggling brethren are manifold, and sad experience has made our race
accustomed to the loss of its brightest sons."

"Thanks for the compliment, fair coz," said Sidney, not without a
complacent cynical pleasure in the knowledge that Raphael spoke truly,
that he owed his own immunity from the obligations of the faith to his
artistic success, and that the outside world was disposed to accord him
a larger charter of morality on the same grounds. "But if you can only
deny nasty facts by accounting for them, I dare say Mr. Armitage's book
will afford you ample opportunities for explanation. Or have Jews the
brazenness to assert it is all invention?"

"No, no one would do that," said Percy Saville, who had just done it.
"Certainly there is a good deal of truth in the sketch of the
ostentatious, over-dressed Johnsons who, as everybody knows, are meant
for the Jonases."

"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith. "And it is quite evident that the
stockbroker who drops half his h's and all his poor acquaintances and
believes in one Lord, is no other than Joel Friedman."

"And the house where people drive up in broughams for supper and solo
whist after the theatre is the Davises' in Maida Vale