But in the deepest peace there is disquiet, and in the relation of his adventures Joseph had begun to display interest in various interpretations of Scripture which he had heard in the synagogues—­true that he laughed at these, but he had met learned heretics from Alexandria in Azariah’s house.  Dan often wondered if these had not tried to impregnate his mind with their religious theories and doctrines, for being without religious interests, Dan was strictly orthodox.

He did not suspect Azariah, whom he knew to be withal orthodox, as much as Azariah’s friend, Apollonius, the Alexandrian Jew.  But though he kept his ears open for the slightest word he could not discover any trace of his influence.  If his discourse had had any effect, it was to make Joseph more than ever a Pharisee.  He was sometimes even inclined to think that Joseph was a little too particular, laying too much stress upon the practice of minute observances, and he began to apprehend that there was something of the Scribe in Joseph after all.  The significance of his mother’s words becoming suddenly clear to Dan, he asked himself if it were not yet within the width of a finger that Joseph would tire of trade and retire to Jerusalem and expound the law and the traditions in the Temple.  His vocation, Dan was of opinion, could not yet be predicted with any certainty:  he might go either way—­to trade or to religious learning—­and in the midst of these meditations on his son’s character Dan remembered that some friends had come to see Joseph at the counting-house yesterday.  Joseph had taken them out into the yard and they had talked together, but it was not of the export of salt fish they had spoken, but of the observances of the Sabbath.  Dan had listened, pen in hand, his thoughts suspended, and had heard them devote many minutes to the question whether a man should dip himself in the nearest brook if he had accidentally touched a pig.  He had heard them discuss at length the grace that should be used before eating fruit from a tree, and whether it were necessary to say three graces after eating three kinds of fruit at one meal.  He had heard one ask if a sheep that had been killed with a Greek knife could be eaten, and he had heard Joseph ask him if he knew the sheep had been killed with a Greek knife and the man confess that he had not made inquiry.  If he had known—­

Dan did not hear the end of the sentence, but imagined that it ended in a gesture of abhorrence.  In his day religion was limited to the law of Moses, a skein well combed out, but the Scribes in Jerusalem had knotted and twisted the skein.  He had heard Joseph maintain, and stiffly too, that an egg laid on the day after the Sabbath could not be eaten, because it had been prepared by the hen on the Sabbath.  But one can’t always be watching hens, he said to himself, and the discussion of such points seeming to him unmanly, he drew back the window-curtain and fell into admiration of his son’s slim loins