ly. "I could have forgiven the
rose-color of the picture if it had been more artistically painted."

"Rose-color!" gasped Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, "rose-color, indeed!" Not
even Sidney's authority could persuade the table into that.

Poor rich Jews! The upper middle-classes had every excuse for being
angry. They knew they were excellent persons, well-educated and
well-travelled, interested in charities (both Jewish and Christian),
people's concerts, district-visiting, new novels, magazines,
reading-circles, operas, symphonies, politics, volunteer regiments,
Show-Sunday and Corporation banquets; that they had sons at Rugby and
Oxford, and daughters who played and painted and sang, and homes that
were bright oases of optimism in a jaded society; that they were good
Liberals and Tories, supplementing their duties as Englishmen with a
solicitude for the best interests of Judaism; that they left no stone
unturned to emancipate themselves from the secular thraldom of
prejudice; and they felt it very hard that a little vulgar section
should always be chosen by their own novelists, and their efforts to
raise the tone of Jewish society passed by.

Sidney, whose conversation always had the air of aloofness from the
race, so that his own foibles often came under the lash of his sarcasm,
proceeded to justify his assertion of the rose-color picture in
_Mordecai Josephs_. He denied that modern English Jews had any religion
whatever; claiming that their faith consisted of forms that had to be
kept up in public, but which they were too shrewd and cute to believe in
or to practise in private, though every one might believe every one else
did; that they looked upon due payment of their synagogue bills as
discharging all their obligations to Heaven; that the preachers secretly
despised the old formulas, and that the Rabbinate declared its
intention of dying for Judaism only as a way of living by it; that the
body politic was dead and rotten with hypocrisy, though the augurs said
it was alive and well. He admitted that the same was true of
Christianity. Raphael reminded him that a number of Jews had drifted
quite openly from the traditional teaching, that thousands of
well-ordered households found inspiration and spiritual satisfaction in
every form of it, and that hypocrisy was too crude a word for the
complex motives of those who obeyed it without inner conviction.

"For instance," said he, "a gentleman said to me the other day--I was
m