“Stop a moment,” said Sidney.  “I’ve been so busy doing justice to this delicious asparagus, that I have allowed Raphael to imagine nobody here has read Mordecai Josephs.  I have, and I say there is more actuality in it than in Daniel Deronda and Nathan der Weise put together.  It is a crude production, all the same; the writer’s artistic gift seems handicapped by a dead-weight of moral platitudes and highfalutin, and even mysticism.  He not only presents his characters but moralizes over them—­actually cares whether they are good or bad, and has yearnings after the indefinable—­it is all very young.  Instead of being satisfied that Judaea gives him characters that are interesting, he actually laments their lack of culture.  Still, what he has done is good enough to make one hope his artistic instinct will shake off his moral.”

“Oh, Sidney, what are you saying?” murmured Addie.

“It’s all right, little girl.  You don’t understand Greek.”

“It’s not Greek,” put in Raphael.  “In Greek art, beauty of soul and beauty of form are one.  It’s French you are talking, though the ignorant ateliers where you picked it up flatter themselves it’s Greek.”

“It’s Greek to Addie, anyhow,” laughed Sidney.  “But that’s what makes the anti-Semitic chapters so unsatisfactory.”

“We all felt their unsatisfactoriness, if we could not analyze it so cleverly,” said the hostess.

“We all felt it,” said Mrs. Montagu Samuels.

“Yes, that’s it,” said Sidney, blandly.  “I could have forgiven the rose-color of the picture if it had been more artistically painted.”

“Rose-color!” gasped Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, “rose-color, indeed!” Not even Sidney’s authority could persuade the table into that.

Poor rich Jews!  The upper middle-classes had every excuse for being angry.  They knew they were excellent persons, well-educated and well-travelled, interested in charities (both Jewish and Christian), people’s concerts, district-visiting, new novels, magazines, reading-circles, operas, symphonies, politics, volunteer regiments, Show-Sunday and Corporation banquets; that they had sons at Rugby and Oxford, and daughters who played and painted and sang, and homes that were bright oases of optimism in a jaded society; that they were good Liberals and Tories, supplementing their duties as Englishmen with a solicitude for the best interests of Judaism; that they left no stone unturned to emancipate themselves from the secular thraldom of prejudice; and they felt it very hard that a little vulgar section should always be chosen by their own novelists, and their efforts to raise the tone of Jewish society passed by.