this is over. I'll telephone you. Don't try to come to
work to-morrow." All this is a hurried aside to Fanny.

Fanny nodded and moved away with Theodore.

Theodore leaned back in the car, but there was no hint of relaxation. He
was as tense and vibrant as one of his own violin strings.

"It went, didn't it? They're like clods, these American audiences."
It was on the tip of Fanny's tongue to say that he had professed
indifference to audiences, but she wisely refrained. "Gad! I'm hungry.
What makes this Fenger hang around so? I'm going to tell him to keep
away, some day. The way he stares at you. Let's go somewhere to-night,
Fan. Or have some people in. I can't sit about after I've played. Olga
always used to have a supper party, or something."

"All right, Ted. Would you like the theater?"

For the first time in her life she felt a little whisper of sympathy for
the despised Olga. Perhaps, after all, she had not been wholly to blame.

He was to leave Sunday morning for Cleveland, where he would play
Monday. He had insisted on taking Mizzi with him, though Fanny had
railed and stormed. Theodore had had his way.

"She's used to it. She likes to travel, don't you, Mizzi? You should
have seen her in Russia, and all over Germany, and in Sweden. She's a
better traveler than her dad."

Saturday morning's papers were kind, but cool. They used words such as
promising, uneven, overambitious, gifted. Theodore crumpled the lot
into a ball and hurled them across the room, swearing horribly. Then he
smoothed them out, clipped them, and saved them carefully. His playing
that night was tinged with bravado, and the Saturday evening audience
rose to it. There was about his performance a glow, a spirit that had
been lacking on the previous day.

Inconsistently enough, he missed the antagonism of the European critics.
He was puzzled and resentful.

"They hardly say a word about the meaning of the concerto. They accept
it as a piece of music, Jewish in theme. It might as well be entitled
Springtime."

"This isn't France or Russia," said Fanny. "Antagonism here isn't
religious. It's personal, almost. You've been away so many years you've
forgotten. They don't object to us as a sect, or a race, but as a type.
That's the trouble, Clarence Heyl says. We're free to build as many
synagogues as we like, and worship in them all day, if we want to. But
we don't want to. The struggle isn't racial any more, but individual.
For some reaso