ed to
preach, and he didn't practise.

"I've heard of that man," said Sidney laughing. "He's a bit of a gambler
and a spendthrift, isn't he? Why do you keep him on?"

"He has a fine voice, you see," said Mr. Goldsmith. "That makes a
Rosenbaum faction at once. Then he has a wife and family. That makes
another."

"Strelitski isn't married, is he?" asked Sidney.

"No," said Mr. Goldsmith, "not yet. The congregation expects him to,
though. I don't care to give him the hint myself; he is a little queer
sometimes."

"He owes it to his position," said Miss Cissy Levine.

"That is what we think," said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, with the majestic
manner that suited her opulent beauty.

"I wish we had him in our synagogue," said Raphael. "Michaels is a
well-meaning worthy man, but he is dreadfully dull."

"Poor Raphael!" said Sidney. "Why did you abolish the old style of
minister who had to slaughter the sheep? Now the minister reserves all
his powers of destruction for his own flock.'"

"I have given him endless hints to preach only once a month," said Mr.
Montagu Samuels dolefully. "But every Saturday our hearts sink as we see
him walk to the pulpit."

"You see, Addie, how a sense of duty makes a man criminal," said
Sidney. "Isn't Michaels the minister who defends orthodoxy in a way that
makes the orthodox rage over his unconscious heresies, while the
heterodox enjoy themselves by looking out for his historical and
grammatical blunders!"

"Poor man, he works hard," said Raphael, gently. "Let him be."

Over the dessert the conversation turned by way of the Rev. Strelitski's
marriage, to the growing willingness of the younger generation to marry
out of Judaism. The table discerned in inter-marriage the beginning of
the end.

"But why postpone the inevitable?" asked Sidney calmly. "What is this
mania for keeping up an effete _ism_? Are we to cripple our lives for
the sake of a word? It's all romantic fudge, the idea of perpetual
isolation. You get into little cliques and mistaken narrow-mindedness
for fidelity to an ideal. I can live for months and forget there are
such beings as Jews in the world. I have floated down the Nile in a
_dahabiya_ while you were beating your breasts in the Synagogue, and the
palm-trees and pelicans knew nothing of your sacrosanct chronological
crisis, your annual epidemic of remorse."

The table thrilled with horror, without, however, quite believing in the
speaker's wickedness. Addie loo