“I’m sure it’s you he’s staring at,” persisted Addie.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” persisted Esther.  “Which man do you mean?”

“There!  The fifth row of stalls, the one, two, four, seven, the seventh man from the end!  He’s been looking at you all through, but now he’s gone in for a good long stare.  There! next to that pretty girl in pink.”

“Do you mean the young man with the dyed carnation in his buttonhole and the crimson handkerchief in his bosom?”

“Yes, that’s the one.  Do you know him?”

“No,” said Esther, lowering her eyes and looking away.  But when Addie informed her that the young man had renewed his attentions to the girl in pink, she levelled her opera-glass at him.  Then she shook her head.

“There seems something familiar about his face, but I cannot for the life of me recall who it is.”

“The something familiar about his face is his nose,” said Addie laughing, “for it is emphatically Jewish.”

“At that rate,” said Sidney, “nearly half the theatre would be familiar, including a goodly proportion of the critics, and Hamlet and Ophelia themselves.  But I know the fellow.”

“You do?  Who is he?” asked the girls eagerly.

“I don’t know.  He’s one of the mashers of the Frivolity.  I’m another, and so we often meet.  But we never speak as we pass by.  To tell the truth, I resent him.”

“It’s wonderful how fond Jews are of the theatre,” said Esther, “and how they resent other Jews going.”

“Thank you,” said Sidney.  “But as I’m not a Jew the arrow glances off.”

“Not a Jew?” repeated Esther in amaze.

“No.  Not in the current sense.  I always deny I’m a Jew.”

“How do you justify that?” said Addie incredulously.

“Because it would be a lie to say I was.  It would be to produce a false impression.  The conception of a Jew in the mind of the average Christian is a mixture of Fagin, Shylock, Rothschild and the caricatures of the American comic papers.  I am certainly not like that, and I’m not going to tell a lie and say I am.  In conversation always think of your audience.  It takes two to make a truth.  If an honest man told an old lady he was an atheist, that would be a lie, for to her it would mean he was a dissolute reprobate.  To call myself ‘Abrahams’ would be to live a daily lie.  I am not a bit like the picture called up by Abrahams.  Graham is a far truer expression of myself.”

“Extremely ingenious,” said Esther smiling.  “But ought you not rather to utilize yourself for the correction of the portrait of Abrahams?”

Sidney shrugged his shoulders.  “Why should I subject myself to petty martyrdom for the sake of an outworn creed and a decaying sect?”

“We are not decaying,” said Addie indignantly.