ked troubled.

"A man and wife of different religions can never know true happiness,"
said the hostess.

"Granted," retorted Sidney. "But why shouldn't Jews without Judaism
marry Christians without Christianity? Must a Jew needs have a Jewess to
help him break the Law?"

"Inter-marriage must not be tolerated," said Raphael. "It would hurt us
less if we had a country. Lacking that, we must preserve our human
boundaries."

"You have good phrases sometimes," admitted Sidney. "But why must we
preserve any boundaries? Why must we exist at all as a separate people?"

"To fulfil the mission of Israel," said Mr. Montagu Samuels solemnly.

"Ah, what is that? That is one of the things nobody ever seems able to
tell me."

"We are God's witnesses," said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, snipping off for
herself a little bunch of hot-house grapes.

"False witnesses, mostly then," said Sidney. "A Christian friend of
mine, an artist, fell in love with a girl and courted her regularly at
her house for four years. Then he proposed; she told him to ask her
father, and he then learned for the first time that the family were
Jewish, and his suit could not therefore be entertained. Could a
satirist have invented anything funnier? Whatever it was Jews have to
bear witness to, these people had been bearing witness to so effectually
that a daily visitor never heard a word of the evidence during four
years. And this family is not an exception; it is a type. Abroad the
English Jew keeps his Judaism in the background, at home in the back
kitchen. When he travels, his Judaism is not packed up among his
_impedimenta_. He never obtrudes his creed, and even his Jewish
newspaper is sent to him in a wrapper labelled something else. How's
that for witnesses? Mind you, I'm not blaming the men, being one of 'em.
They may be the best fellows going, honorable, high-minded,
generous--why expect them to be martyrs more than other Englishmen?
Isn't life hard enough without inventing a new hardship? I declare
there's no narrower creature in the world than your idealist; he sets up
a moral standard which suits his own line of business, and rails at men
of the world for not conforming to it. God's witnesses, indeed! I say
nothing of those who are rather the Devil's witnesses, but think of the
host of Jews like myself who, whether they marry Christians or not,
simply drop out, and whose absence of all religion escapes notice in the
medley of creeds. We no more give