ed to impress Mabel. 'Zionism's all very
well for Christians--they're in no danger of having to go to
Palestine,' she had reflected shrewdly.

'And why couldn't you live entirely among Jews?' Barstein asked
slowly.

Mabel drew a great breath, as if throwing off a suffocating weight.
'One couldn't breathe,' she explained.

'Aren't you living among Jews now?'

'Don't look so glum, silly. You don't want Jews as background as well
as foreground. A great Ghetto!' And again she shuddered instinctively.

'Every other people is background as well as foreground. And you don't
call France a Ghetto or Italy a Ghetto?' There was anti-Semitism, he
felt--unconscious anti-Semitism--behind Mabel's instinctive repugnance
to an aggregation of Jews. And he knew that her instinct would be
shared by every Jew in that festive aggregation around him. His heart
sank. Never--even in those East End back-rooms where the pitiful
disproportion of his consumptive-looking collaborators to their great
task was sometimes borne in dismally upon him--had he felt so black a
despair as in this brilliant supper-room, surrounded by all that was
strong and strenuous in the race--lawyers and soldiers, and men of
affairs, whose united forces and finances could achieve almost
anything they set their heart upon.

'Jews can't live off one another,' Mabel explained with an air of
philosophy.

Barstein did not reply. He was asking himself with an artist's
analytical curiosity whence came this suicidal anti-Semitism. Was it
the self-contempt natural to a race that had not the strength to build
and fend for itself? No, alas! it did not even spring from so
comparatively noble a source. It was merely a part of their general
imitation of their neighbours--Jews, reflecting everything, had
reflected even the dislike for the Jew; only since the individual
could not dislike himself, he applied the dislike to the race. And
this unconscious assumption of the prevailing point of view was
quickened by the fact that the Jewish firstcomers were always aware of
an existence on sufferance, with their slowly-won privileges
jeopardized if too many other Jews came in their wake. He consulted
his own pre-Zionist psychology. 'Yes,' he decided. 'Every Jew who
moves into our country, our city, our watering-place, our street even,
seems to us an invader or an interloper. He draws attention to us, he
accentuates our difference from the normal, he increases the chance of
the renewal