“And you like him?”

“Immensely.”

“And you never remember he is a Jew?” This was one of the things Jack had never understood.

“Never;—­that’s not his fault,—­rather to his credit.”

“Why?”

“Because the world is against both him and his race, and yet in all the years I have known him, nothing has ever soured his temper.”

Jack struck a match, relit his cigar and settling himself more comfortably in his chair, said in a positive tone: 

“Sour or sweet,—­I don’t like Jews,—­never did.”

“You don’t like him because you don’t know him.  That’s your fault, not his.  But you would like him, let me tell you, if you could hear him talk.  And now I think of it, I am determined you shall know him, and right away.  Not that he cares—­Cohen’s friends are among the best men in London, especially the better grade of theatrical people, whose clothes he has made and whose purses he has kept full—­yes—­and whom he sometimes had to bury to keep them out of Potter’s field; and those he knows here—­his kind of people, I mean, not yours.”

“All in his line of business, Uncle Peter,” Jack laughed.  “How much interest did they pay,—­cent per cent?”

“I am ashamed of you, Jack.  Not a penny.  Don’t let your mind get clogged up, my boy, with such prejudices,—­keep the slate of your judgment sponged clean.”

“But you believe everybody is clean, Uncle Peter.”

“And so must you, until you prove them dirty.  Now, will you do me a very great kindness and yourself one as well?  Please go downstairs, rap three times at Mr. Cohen’s shutters—­hard, so that he can hear you—­that’s my signal—­present my compliments and ask him to be kind enough to come up and have a cigar with us.”

Jack leaned forward in his seat, his face showing his astonishment.

“You don’t mean it?”

“I do.”

“All right.”

The boy was out of his chair and clattering down-stairs before Peter could add another word to his message.  If he had asked him to crawl out on the roof and drop himself into the third-story window of the next house, he would have obeyed him with the same alacrity.

Peter wheeled up another chair; added some small and large glasses to the collection on the tray and awaited Jack’s return.  The experience was not new.  The stupid, illogical prejudice was not confined to inexperienced lads.

He had had the same thing to contend with dozens of times before.  Even Holker had once said:  “Peter, what the devil do you find in that little shrimp of a Hebrew to interest you?  Is he cold that you warm him, or hungry that you feed him,—­or lonely that—­”

“Stop right there, Holker!  You’ve said it,—­lonely—­that’s it—­ lonely!  That’s what made me bring him up the first time he was ever here.  It seemed such a wicked thing to me to have him at one end of the house—­the bottom end, too—­crooning over a fire, and I at the top end crooning over another, when one blaze could warm us both.  So up he came, Holker, and now it is I who am lonely when a week passes and Isaac does not tap at my door, or I tap at his.”