strange?--they were all Jews,
his friends and inspirers; Heine and Boerne in his youth, and now in
his manhood, Karl Marx. Was it perhaps their sense of the great Ghetto
tragedy that had quickened their indignation against all wrong?

Well, human injustice was approaching its term at last. The Kingdom of
Heaven on earth was beginning to announce itself by signs and
portents. The religion of the future was dawning--the Church of the
People. "O father, father!" he cried, "if you could have lived to see
my triumph!"

V

There was a knock at the door.

His man appeared, but, instead of announcing the Countess Hatzfeldt,
as Lassalle's face expected, he tendered a letter.

Lassalle's face changed yet again, and the thought of the Countess
died out of it as he caught sight of the graceful writing of Sophie de
Solutzew. What memories it brought back of the first real passion of
his life, when, whirled off his feet by an unsuspected current,
enchanted yet astonished to be no longer the easy conqueror throwing
crumbs of love to poor fluttering woman, he had asked the Russian girl
to share his strife and triumphs. That he should want to marry her had
been as amazing to him as her refusal. What talks they had had in this
very room, when she passed through Berlin with her ailing father! How
he had suffered from the delay of her decision, foreseen, yet none the
less paralyzing when it came. And yet no, not paralyzing; he could not
but recognize that the shock had in reality been a stimulation. It was
in the reaction against his misery, in the subtle pleasure of a
temptation escaped despite himself, and of regained freedom to work
for his great ideals, that he had leapt for the first time into
political agitation. The episode had made him reconsider, like a great
sickness or a bereavement. It had shown him that life was slipping,
that afternoon was coming, that in a few more years he would be forty,
that the "Wonder-Child," as Humboldt had styled him, was grown to
mature man, and that all the vent he had as yet found for his great
gifts was a series of scandalous law-suits and an esoteric volume of
the philosophy of Heraclitus the Dark. And now, coming to him in the
midst of his great spurt, this letter from the quieter world of three
years ago--though he himself had provoked it--seemed almost of
dreamland. Its unexpected warmth kindled in him something of the old
glow. Brussels! She was in western Europe again, then. Yes, sh