“And then, you catch more than you bargain for,” said Rachel, looking up roguishly from her knitting.

Solomon stuck his tongue in his cheek and grimaced.

Isaac came behind Levi and gave his coat a pull and toddled off with a yell of delight.

“Be quiet, Ikey!” cried Esther.  “If you don’t behave better I shan’t sleep in your new bed.”

“Oh yeth, you mutht, Ethty,” lisped Ikey, his elfish face growing grave.  He went about depressed for some seconds.

“Kids are a beastly nuisance,” said Levi, “don’t you think so, Esther?”

“Oh no, not always,” said the little girl.  “Besides we were all kids once.”

“That’s what I complain of,” said Levi.  “We ought to be all born grown-up.”

“But that’s impossible!” put in Rachel.

“It isn’t impossible at all,” said Esther.  “Look at Adam and Eve!”

Levi looked at Esther gratefully instead.  He felt nearer to her and thought of persuading her into playing Kiss-in-the-Ring.  But he found it difficult to back out of his undertaking to play I-spy-I with Solomon; and in the end he had to leave Esther to her book.

She had little in common with her brother Solomon, least of all humor and animal spirits.  Even before the responsibilities of headship had come upon her she was a preternaturally thoughtful little girl who had strange intuitions about things and was doomed to work out her own salvation as a metaphysician.  When she asked her mother who made God, a slap in the face demonstrated to her the limits of human inquiry.  The natural instinct of the child over-rode the long travail of the race to conceive an abstract Deity, and Esther pictured God as a mammoth cloud.  In early years Esther imagined that the “body” that was buried when a person died was the corpse decapitated and she often puzzled herself to think what was done with the isolated head.  When her mother was being tied up in grave-clothes, Esther hovered about with a real thirst for knowledge while the thoughts of all the other children were sensuously concentrated on the funeral and the glory of seeing a vehicle drive away from their own door.  Esther was also disappointed at not seeing her mother’s soul fly up to heaven though she watched vigilantly at the death-bed for the ascent of the long yellow hook-shaped thing.  The genesis of this conception of the soul was probably to be sought in the pictorial representations of ghosts in the story-papers brought home by her eldest brother Benjamin.  Strange shadowy conceptions of things more corporeal floated up from her solitary reading.  Theatres she came across often, and a theatre was a kind of Babel plain or Vanity Fair in which performers and spectators were promiscuously mingled and wherein the richer folk clad in evening dress sat in thin deal boxes—­the cases in Spitalfields market being Esther’s main association with boxes.  One of her day-dreams of the future was going to the theatre in a night-gown