uld it be desirable,--
she thought that she might induce him to go nowhere, so that she might
be able to pass him off as a Christian. She knew that such was the
Christianity of young Goldsheiner, of which the Starts were now
boasting.

Had she been alone in the world she thought that she could have looked
forward to her destiny with complacency; but she was afraid of her
father and mother. Lady Pomona was distressingly old-fashioned, and
had so often spoken with horror even of the approach of a Jew,--and had
been so loud in denouncing the iniquity of Christians who allowed such
people into their houses! Unfortunately, too, Georgiana in her earlier
days had re-echoed all her mother's sentiments. And then her father,--
if he had ever earned for himself the right to be called a Conservative
politician by holding a real opinion of his own,--it had been on that
matter of admitting the Jews into parliament. When that had been done
he was certain that the glory of England was sunk for ever. And since
that time, whenever creditors were more than ordinarily importunate,
when Slow and Bideawhile could do nothing for him, he would refer to
that fatal measure as though it was the cause of every embarrassment
which had harassed him. How could she tell parents such as these that
she was engaged to marry a man who at the present moment went to
synagogue on a Saturday and carried out every other filthy abomination
common to the despised people?

That Mr Brehgert was a fat, greasy man of fifty, conspicuous for
hair-dye, was in itself distressing:--but this minor distress was
swallowed up in the greater. Miss Longestaffe was a girl possessing
considerable discrimination, and was able to weigh her own possessions
in just scales. She had begun life with very high aspirations,
believing in her own beauty, in her mother's fashion, and her father's
fortune. She had now been ten years at the work, and was aware that
she had always flown a little too high for her mark at the time. At
nineteen and twenty and twenty-one she had thought that all the world
was before her. With her commanding figure, regular long features, and
bright complexion, she had regarded herself as one of the beauties of
the day, and had considered herself entitled to demand wealth and a
Coronet. At twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four any young peer,
or peer's eldest son, with a house in town and in the country, might
have sufficed. Twenty-five and six had been the y