portioned room, and restful without being in the least gloomy.
Then she had been interested in the congregation as it rustled in. She
thought she had never seen so many modishly gowned women in one room
in all her life. The men were sleekly broadclothed, but they lacked the
well-dressed air, somehow. The women were slimly elegant in tailor suits
and furs. They all looked as if they had been turned out by the same
tailor. An artist, in his line, but of limited imagination. Dr. Kirsch,
sociologist and savant, aquiline, semi-bald, grimly satiric, sat in
his splendid, high-backed chair, surveying his silken flock through
half-closed lids. He looked tired, and rather ill, Fanny thought, but
distinctly a personage. She wondered if he held them or they him. That
recalled to her the little Winnebago Temple and Rabbi Thalmann.
She remembered the frequent rudeness and open inattention of that
congregation. No doubt Mrs. Nathan Pereles had her counterpart here, and
the hypocritical Bella Weinberg, too, and the giggling Aarons girls,
and old Ben Reitman. Here Dr. Kirsch had risen, and, coming forward, had
paused to lean over his desk and, with an awful geniality, had looked
down upon two rustling, exquisitely gowned late-comers. They sank into
their seats, cowed. Fanny grinned. He began his lecture something
about modern politics. Fanny was fascinated and resentful by turns. His
brilliant satire probed, cut, jabbed like a surgeon's scalpel; or he
railed, scolded, snarled, like a dyspeptic schoolmaster. Often he was
in wretched taste. He mimicked, postured, sneered. But he had this
millionaire congregation of his in hand. Fanny found herself smiling
up at him, delightedly. Perhaps this wasn't religion, as she had been
taught to look upon it, but it certainly was tonic. She told herself
that she would have come to the same conclusion if Kirsch had occupied a
Methodist pulpit.

There were no Kaddish prayers in Kirsch's Temple. On the Friday
following the first anniversary of Molly Brandeis's death Fanny did not
go home after working hours, but took a bite of supper in a neighborhood
restaurant. Then she found her way to one of the orthodox Russian Jewish
synagogues on the west side. It was a dim, odorous, bare little place,
this house of worship. Fanny had never seen one like it before. She was
herded up in the gallery, where the women sat. And when the patriarchal
rabbi began to intone the prayer for the dead Fanny threw the gallery