urt by the kick of the gun. Percy colored slightly,
unmollified by being in the same boat with the satirist.

"I have never seen the name in the subscription lists," said the hostess
with ready tact.

"There is an Armitage who subscribes two guineas a year to the Board of
Guardians," said Mrs. Montagu Samuels. "But his Christian name is
George."

"'Christian' name is distinctly good for 'George,'" murmured Sidney.

"There was an Armitage who sent a cheque to the Russian Fund," said Mr.
Henry Goldsmith, "but that can't be an author--it was quite a large
cheque!"

"I am sure I have seen Armitage among the Births, Marriages and Deaths,"
said Miss Cissy Levine.

"How well-read they all are in the national literature," Sidney murmured
to Addie.

Indeed the sectarian advertisements served to knit the race together,
counteracting the unravelling induced by the fashionable dispersion of
Israel and waxing the more important as the other links--the old
traditional jokes, by-words, ceremonies, card-games, prejudices and
tunes, which are more important than laws and more cementatory than
ideals--were disappearing before the over-zealousness of a _parvenu_
refinement that had not yet attained to self-confidence. The Anglo-Saxon
stolidity of the West-End Synagogue service, on week days entirely given
over to paid praying-men, was a typical expression of the universal
tendency to exchange the picturesque primitiveness of the Orient for the
sobrieties of fashionable civilization. When Jeshurun waxed fat he did
not always kick, but he yearned to approximate as much as possible to
John Bull without merging in him; to sink himself and yet not be
absorbed, not to be and yet to be. The attempt to realize the asymptote
in human mathematics was not quite successful, too near an approach to
John Bull generally assimilating Jeshurun away. For such is the nature
of Jeshurun. Enfranchise him, give him his own way and you make a new
man of him; persecute him and he is himself again.

"But if nobody has read the man's book," Raphael Leon ventured to
interrupt at last, "is it quite fair to assume his book isn't fit to
read?"

The shy dark little girl he had taken down to dinner darted an
appreciative glance at her neighbor. It was in accordance with Raphael's
usual anxiety to give the devil his due, that he should be unwilling to
condemn even the writer of an anti-Semitic novel unheard. But then it
was an open secret in the family that R