d his shoulders. "Why should I subject myself to petty
martyrdom for the sake of an outworn creed and a decaying sect?"

"We are not decaying," said Addie indignantly.

"Personally you are blossoming," said Sidney, with a mock bow. "But
nobody can deny that our recent religious history has been a series of
dissolving views. Look at that young masher there, who is still ogling
your fascinating friend; rather, I suspect, to the annoyance of the
young lady in pink, and compare him with the old hard-shell Jew. When I
was a lad named Abrahams, painfully training in the way I wasn't going
to go, I got an insight into the lives of my ancestors. Think of the
people who built up the Jewish prayer-book, who added line to line and
precept to precept, and whose whole thought was intertwined with
religion, and then look at that young fellow with the dyed carnation and
the crimson silk handkerchief, who probably drives a drag to the Derby,
and for aught I know runs a music hall. It seems almost incredible he
should come of that Puritan old stock."

"Not at all," said Esther. "If you knew more of our history, you would
see it is quite normal. We were always hankering after the gods of the
heathen, and we always loved magnificence; remember our Temples. In
every land we have produced great merchants and rulers, prime-ministers,
viziers, nobles. We built castles in Spain (solid ones) and palaces in
Venice. We have had saints and sinners, free livers and ascetics,
martyrs and money-lenders. Polarity, Graetz calls the self-contradiction
which runs through our history. I figure the Jew as the eldest-born of
Time, touching the Creation and reaching forward into the future, the
true _blase_ of the Universe; the Wandering Jew who has been everywhere,
seen everything, done everything, led everything, thought everything and
suffered everything."

"Bravo, quite a bit of Beaconsfieldian fustian," said Sidney laughing,
yet astonished. "One would think you were anxious to assert yourself
against the ancient peerage of this mushroom realm."

"It is the bare historical truth," said Esther, quietly. "We are so
ignorant of our own history--can we wonder at the world's ignorance of
it? Think of the part the Jew has played--Moses giving the world its
morality, Jesus its religion, Isaiah its millennial visions, Spinoza its
cosmic philosophy, Ricardo its political economy, Karl Marx and Lassalle
its socialism, Heine its loveliest poetry, Mendelssohn it