“But why postpone the inevitable?” asked Sidney calmly.  “What is this mania for keeping up an effete ism?  Are we to cripple our lives for the sake of a word?  It’s all romantic fudge, the idea of perpetual isolation.  You get into little cliques and mistaken narrow-mindedness for fidelity to an ideal.  I can live for months and forget there are such beings as Jews in the world.  I have floated down the Nile in a dahabiya while you were beating your breasts in the Synagogue, and the palm-trees and pelicans knew nothing of your sacrosanct chronological crisis, your annual epidemic of remorse.”

The table thrilled with horror, without, however, quite believing in the speaker’s wickedness.  Addie looked troubled.

“A man and wife of different religions can never know true happiness,” said the hostess.

“Granted,” retorted Sidney.  “But why shouldn’t Jews without Judaism marry Christians without Christianity?  Must a Jew needs have a Jewess to help him break the Law?”

“Inter-marriage must not be tolerated,” said Raphael.  “It would hurt us less if we had a country.  Lacking that, we must preserve our human boundaries.”

“You have good phrases sometimes,” admitted Sidney.  “But why must we preserve any boundaries?  Why must we exist at all as a separate people?”

“To fulfil the mission of Israel,” said Mr. Montagu Samuels solemnly.

“Ah, what is that?  That is one of the things nobody ever seems able to tell me.”

“We are God’s witnesses,” said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, snipping off for herself a little bunch of hot-house grapes.

“False witnesses, mostly then,” said Sidney.  “A Christian friend of mine, an artist, fell in love with a girl and courted her regularly at her house for four years.  Then he proposed; she told him to ask her father, and he then learned for the first time that the family were Jewish, and his suit could not therefore be entertained.  Could a satirist have invented anything funnier?  Whatever it was Jews have to bear witness to, these people had been bearing witness to so effectually that a daily visitor never heard a word of the evidence during four years.  And this family is not an exception; it is a type.  Abroad the English Jew keeps his Judaism in the background, at home in the back kitchen.  When he travels, his Judaism is not packed up among his impedimenta.  He never obtrudes his creed, and even his Jewish newspaper is sent to him in a wrapper labelled something else.  How’s that for witnesses?  Mind you, I’m not blaming the men, being one of ’em.  They may be the best fellows going, honorable, high-minded, generous—­why expect them to be martyrs more than other Englishmen?  Isn’t life hard enough without inventing a new hardship?  I declare there’s no narrower creature in the world than your idealist; he sets up a moral standard which suits his own line of business, and rails at men of the world for not conforming to it.  God’s witnesses,