unbroken even at home.  Miriam herself, the least reticent, did not give the impression that she could not have husbands for the winking.  Her demands were so high—­that was all.  Daniel was proud of her and her position and her cleverness and was confident she would marry as well as she dressed.  He did not expect her to contribute towards the expenses of the household—­though she did—­for he felt he had broad shoulders.  He bore his father and mother on those shoulders, semi-invalids both.  In the bold bad years of shameless poverty, Hyams had been a wandering metropolitan glazier, but this open degradation became intolerable as Miriam’s prospects improved.  It was partly for her sake that Daniel ultimately supported his parents in idleness and refrained from speaking to Bessie.  For he was only an employe in a fancy-goods warehouse, and on forty-five shillings a week you cannot keep up two respectable establishments.

Bessie was a bonnie girl and could not in the nature of things be long uncaught.  There was a certain night on which Daniel did not sleep—­hardly a white night as our French neighbors say; a tear-stained night rather.  In the morning he was resolved to deny himself Bessie.  Peace would be his instead.  If it did not come immediately he knew it was on the way.  For once before he had struggled and been so rewarded.  That was in his eighteenth year when he awoke to the glories of free thought, and knew himself a victim to the Moloch of the Sabbath, to which fathers sacrifice their children.  The proprietor of the fancy goods was a Jew, and moreover closed on Saturdays.  But for this anachronism of keeping Saturday holy when you had Sunday also to laze on, Daniel felt a hundred higher careers would have been open to him.  Later, when free thought waned (it was after Daniel had met Bessie), although he never returned to his father’s narrowness, he found the abhorred Sabbath sanctifying his life.  It made life a conscious voluntary sacrifice to an ideal, and the reward was a touch of consecration once a week.  Daniel could not have described these things, nor did he speak of them, which was a pity.  Once and once only in the ferment of free thought he had uncorked his soul, and it had run over with much froth, and thenceforward old Mendel Hyams and Beenah, his wife, opposed more furrowed foreheads to a world too strong for them.  If Daniel had taken back his words and told them he was happier for the ruin they had made of his prospects, their gait might not have been so listless.  But he was a silent man.

“You will go to Sugarman’s, mother,” he said now.  “You and father.  Don’t mind that I’m not going.  I have another appointment for the afternoon.”

It was a superfluous lie for so silent a man.

“He doesn’t like to be seen with us,” Beenah Hyams thought.  But she was silent.

“He has never forgiven my putting him to the fancy goods,” thought Mendel Hyams when told.  But he was silent.