“No, no, this must not be!” he cried, and his hand gripped hers fiercely, as if he were afraid of her being dragged away by main force.  He was terribly agitated; his whole being seemed to be undergoing profound and novel emotions.  Their eyes met; in one and the same instant the knowledge broke upon her that she loved him, and that if she chose to play the woman he was hers, and life a Paradisian dream.  The sweetness of the thought intoxicated her, thrilled her veins with fire.  But the next instant she was chilled as by a gray cold fog.  The realities of things came back, a whirl of self-contemptuous thoughts blent with a hopeless sense of the harshness of life.  Who was she to aspire to such a match?  Had her earlier day-dream left her no wiser than that?  The Schnorrer’s daughter setting her cap at the wealthy Oxford man, forsooth!  What would people say?  And what would they say if they knew how she had sought him out in his busy seclusion to pitch a tale of woe and move him by his tenderness of heart to a pity he mistook momentarily for love?  The image of Levi came back suddenly; she quivered, reading herself through his eyes.  And yet would not his crude view be right?  Suppress the consciousness as she would in her maiden breast, had she not been urged hither by an irresistible impulse?  Knowing what she felt now, she could not realize she had been ignorant of it when she set out.  She was a deceitful, scheming little thing.  Angry with herself, she averted her gaze from the eyes that hungered for her, though they were yet unlit by self-consciousness; she loosed her hand from his, and as if the cessation of the contact restored her self-respect, some of her anger passed unreasonably towards him.

“What right, have you to say it must not be?” she inquired haughtily.  “Do you think I can’t take care of myself, that I need any one to protect me or to help me?”

“No—­I—­I—­only mean—­” he stammered in infinite distress, feeling himself somehow a blundering brute.

“Remember I am not like the girls you are used to meet.  I have known the worst that life can offer.  I can stand alone, yes, and face the whole world.  Perhaps you don’t know that I wrote Mordecai Josephs, the book you burlesqued so mercilessly!”

“You wrote it!”

“Yes, I. I am Edward Armitage.  Did those initials never strike you?  I wrote it and I glory in it.  Though all Jewry cry out ’The picture is false,’ I say it is true.  So now you know the truth.  Proclaim it to all Hyde Park and Maida Vale, tell it to all your narrow-minded friends and acquaintances, and let them turn and rend me.  I can live without them or their praise.  Too long they have cramped my soul.  Now at last I am going to cut myself free.  From them and from you and all your petty prejudices and interests.  Good-bye, for ever.”

She went out abruptly, leaving the room dark and Raphael shaken and dumbfounded; she went down the stairs and into the keen bright air, with a fierce exultation at her heart, an intoxicating sense of freedom and defiance.  It was over.  She had vindicated herself to herself and to the imaginary critics.  The last link that bound her to Jewry was snapped; it was impossible it could ever be reforged.  Raphael knew her in her true colors at last.  She seemed to herself a Spinoza the race had cast out.