“How well-read they all are in the national literature,” Sidney murmured to Addie.

Indeed the sectarian advertisements served to knit the race together, counteracting the unravelling induced by the fashionable dispersion of Israel and waxing the more important as the other links—­the old traditional jokes, by-words, ceremonies, card-games, prejudices and tunes, which are more important than laws and more cementatory than ideals—­were disappearing before the over-zealousness of a parvenu refinement that had not yet attained to self-confidence.  The Anglo-Saxon stolidity of the West-End Synagogue service, on week days entirely given over to paid praying-men, was a typical expression of the universal tendency to exchange the picturesque primitiveness of the Orient for the sobrieties of fashionable civilization.  When Jeshurun waxed fat he did not always kick, but he yearned to approximate as much as possible to John Bull without merging in him; to sink himself and yet not be absorbed, not to be and yet to be.  The attempt to realize the asymptote in human mathematics was not quite successful, too near an approach to John Bull generally assimilating Jeshurun away.  For such is the nature of Jeshurun.  Enfranchise him, give him his own way and you make a new man of him; persecute him and he is himself again.

“But if nobody has read the man’s book,” Raphael Leon ventured to interrupt at last, “is it quite fair to assume his book isn’t fit to read?”

The shy dark little girl he had taken down to dinner darted an appreciative glance at her neighbor.  It was in accordance with Raphael’s usual anxiety to give the devil his due, that he should be unwilling to condemn even the writer of an anti-Semitic novel unheard.  But then it was an open secret in the family that Raphael was mad.  They did their best to hush it up, but among themselves they pitied him behind his back.  Even Sidney considered his cousin Raphael pushed a dubious virtue too far in treating people’s very prejudices with the deference due to earnest reasoned opinions.

“But we know enough of the book to know we are badly treated,” protested the hostess.

“We have always been badly treated in literature,” said Raphael.  “We are made either angels or devils.  On the one hand, Lessing and George Eliot, on the other, the stock dramatist and novelist with their low-comedy villain.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Goldsmith, doubtfully, for she could not quite think Raphael had become infected by his cousin’s propensity for paradox.  “Do you think George Eliot and Lessing didn’t understand the Jewish character?”

“They are the only writers who have ever understood it,” affirmed Miss Cissy Levine, emphatically.

A little scornful smile played for a second about the mouth of the dark little girl.