“That’s always the way with brothers.  Solomon says—­” She paused suddenly.

“I don’t remember for the moment that Solomon has any proverb on the subject,” he said, still amused at the idea of Addie as an authoress.

“I was thinking of something else.  Good-bye.  Remember me to your sister, please.”

“Certainly,” he said.  Then he exclaimed, “Oh, what a block-head I am!  I forgot to remember her to you.  She says she would be so pleased if you would come and have tea and a chat with her some day.  I should like you and Addie to know each other.”

“Thanks, I will.  I will write to her some day.  Good-bye, once more.”

He shook hands with her and fumbled at the door.

“Allow me!” she said, and opened it upon the gray dulness of the dripping street.  “When may I hope for the honor of another visit from a real live editor?”

“I don’t know,” he said, smiling.  “I’m awfully busy, I have to read a paper on Ibn Ezra at Jews’ College to-day fortnight.”

“Outsiders admitted?” she asked.

“The lectures are for outsiders,” he said.  “To spread the knowledge of our literature.  Only they won’t come.  Have you never been to one?”

She shook her head.

“There!” he said.  “You complain of our want of culture, and you don’t even know what’s going on.”

She tried to take the reproof with a smile, but the corners of her mouth quivered.  He raised his hat and went down the steps.

She followed him a little way along the Terrace, with eyes growing dim with tears she could not account for.  She went back to the drawing-room and threw herself into the arm-chair where he had sat, and made her headache worse by thinking of all her unhappiness.  The great room was filling with dusk, and in the twilight pictures gathered and dissolved.  What girlish dreams and revolts had gone to make that unfortunate book, which after endless boomerang-like returns from the publishers, had appeared, only to be denounced by Jewry, ignored by its journals and scantily noticed by outside criticisms. Mordecai Josephs had fallen almost still-born from the press; the sweet secret she had hoped to tell her patroness had turned bitter like that other secret of her dead love for Sidney, in the reaction from which she had written most of her book.  How fortunate at least that her love had flickered out, had proved but the ephemeral sentiment of a romantic girl for the first brilliant man she had met.  Sidney had fascinated her by his verbal audacities in a world of narrow conventions; he had for the moment laughed away spiritual aspirations and yearnings with a raillery that was almost like ozone to a young woman avid of martyrdom for the happiness of the world.  How, indeed, could she have expected the handsome young artist to feel the magic that hovered about her talks with him, to know the thrill that lay in the formal hand-clasp, to be aware that he interpreted