the honor of another visit from a
real live editor?"

"I don't know," he said, smiling. "I'm awfully busy, I have to read a
paper on Ibn Ezra at Jews' College to-day fortnight."

"Outsiders admitted?" she asked.

"The lectures _are_ for outsiders," he said. "To spread the knowledge of
our literature. Only they won't come. Have you never been to one?"

She shook her head.

"There!" he said. "You complain of our want of culture, and you don't
even know what's going on."

She tried to take the reproof with a smile, but the corners of her mouth
quivered. He raised his hat and went down the steps.

She followed him a little way along the Terrace, with eyes growing dim
with tears she could not account for. She went back to the drawing-room
and threw herself into the arm-chair where he had sat, and made her
headache worse by thinking of all her unhappiness. The great room was
filling with dusk, and in the twilight pictures gathered and dissolved.
What girlish dreams and revolts had gone to make that unfortunate book,
which after endless boomerang-like returns from the publishers, had
appeared, only to be denounced by Jewry, ignored by its journals and
scantily noticed by outside criticisms. _Mordecai Josephs_ had fallen
almost still-born from the press; the sweet secret she had hoped to tell
her patroness had turned bitter like that other secret of her dead love
for Sidney, in the reaction from which she had written most of her book.
How fortunate at least that her love had flickered out, had proved but
the ephemeral sentiment of a romantic girl for the first brilliant man
she had met. Sidney had fascinated her by his verbal audacities in a
world of narrow conventions; he had for the moment laughed away
spiritual aspirations and yearnings with a raillery that was almost like
ozone to a young woman avid of martyrdom for the happiness of the world.
How, indeed, could she have expected the handsome young artist to feel
the magic that hovered about her talks with him, to know the thrill that
lay in the formal hand-clasp, to be aware that he interpreted for her
poems and pictures, and incarnated the undefined ideal of girlish
day-dreams? How could he ever have had other than an intellectual
thought of her; how could any man, even the religious Raphael? Sickly,
ugly little thing that she was! She got up and looked in the glass now
to see herself thus, but the shadows had gathered too thickly. She
snatched up a newspaper that