, that America should have meant pure
loss to him. He had at least kept the spiritual satisfaction of
despising the despiser, the dignity of righteous resentment, the
artist's pride in the profitless. And this riot of ugliness and
diamonds and third-rate celebrities was the fashionable society to
which, forsooth, the Jew could not be permitted access!

The aroma of an expensive cigar wafted towards him, and the face
between whose prominent teeth it was stuck loomed vividly in the glare
of an electric light. Rozenoffski recognised those teeth. He had seen
countless pictures and caricatures of them, for did they not almost
hold the globe in their grip? This, then was the notorious
multi-millionaire, 'the Napoleon in dollars,' as a wit had summed him
up; and the first sight of Andrew P. Wilhammer almost consoled the
player for his poverty. Who, even for an imperial income, would bear
the burden of those grotesque teeth, protruding like a sample of wares
in a dentist's showcase? But as the teeth came nearer and the great
rubicund face bore down upon him, the prominence of the notorious
incisors affected him less than their carnivorous capacity--he felt
himself almost swallowed up by this monstrous beast of prey, so
admirably equated to our small day of large things, to that
environment in which he, poor degenerate artist, was but a little
singing-bird. The long-forgotten word _Rishus_ came suddenly into his
mind--was not the man's anti-Semitism as obtruded as his
teeth?--_Rishus_, that wicked malice, which to a persecuted people had
become almost a synonym for Christianity. He had left the thought
behind him, as he had left the Hebrew word, while he went sailing up
into the rosy ether of success, and _Rishus_ had sunk into the mere
panic-word of the Ghetto's stunted brood, shrinking and quivering
before phantasms, sinuously gliding through a misunderstood world, if
it was not, indeed, rather a word conveniently cloaking from
themselves a multitude of their own sins. But now, as incarnated in
this millionaire mammoth, the shadowy word took on a sudden solidity,
to which his teeth gave the necessary tearing and rending
significance.

Yes, in very sooth--he remembered it suddenly--was it not this man's
wife on whom he had built his main hopes? Was she not the leader of
musical America, to whom the Belgian princess had given him the
scented and crested note of introduction which was to open to him all
doors and all ears? Was