“And did he?”

“No, I am still stepmotherless.  Your white tie’s gone wrong.  It’s all on one side.”

“It generally is,” said Raphael, fumbling perfunctorily at the little bow.

“Let me put it straight.  There!  And now you know all about me.  I hope you are going to repay my confidences in kind.”

“I am afraid I cannot oblige with anything so romantic,” he said smiling.  “I was born of rich but honest parents, of a family settled in England for three generations, and went to Harrow and Oxford in due course.  That is all.  I saw a little of the Ghetto, though, when I was a boy.  I had some correspondence on Hebrew Literature with a great Jewish scholar, Gabriel Hamburg (he lives in Stockholm now), and one day when I was up from Harrow I went to see him.  By good fortune I assisted at the foundation of the Holy Land League, now presided over by Gideon, the member for Whitechapel.  I was moved to tears by the enthusiasm; it was there I made the acquaintance of Strelitski.  He spoke as if inspired.  I also met a poverty-stricken poet, Melchitsedek Pinchas, who afterwards sent me his work, Metatoron’s Flames, to Harrow.  A real neglected genius.  Now there’s the man to bear in mind when one speaks of Jews and poetry.  After that night I kept up a regular intercourse with the Ghetto, and have been there several times lately.”

“But surely you don’t also long to return to Palestine?”

“I do.  Why should we not have our own country?”

“It would be too chaotic!  Fancy all the Ghettos of the world amalgamating.  Everybody would want to be ambassador at Paris, as the old joke says.”

“It would be a problem for the statesmen among us.  Dissenters, Churchmen, Atheists, Slum Savages, Clodhoppers, Philosophers, Aristocrats—­make up Protestant England.  It is the popular ignorance of the fact that Jews are as diverse as Protestants that makes such novels as we were discussing at dinner harmful.”

“But is the author to blame for that?  He does not claim to present the whole truth but a facet.  English society lionized Thackeray for his pictures of it.  Good heavens!  Do Jews suppose they alone are free from the snobbery, hypocrisy and vulgarity that have shadowed every society that has ever existed?”

“In no work of art can the spectator be left out of account,” he urged.  “In a world full of smouldering prejudices a scrap of paper may start the bonfire.  English society can afford to laugh where Jewish society must weep.  That is why our papers are always so effusively grateful for Christian compliments.  You see it is quite true that the author paints not the Jews but bad Jews, but, in the absence of paintings of good Jews, bad Jews are taken as identical with Jews.”

“Oh, then you agree with the others about the book?” she said in a disappointed tone.

“I haven’t read it; I am speaking generally.  Have you?”

“Yes.”