"Yes," said poor Raphael with a sickly smile, "but suppose neither of us goes to some important meeting."

"No harm done. God bless you, I know the styles of all our chief speakers—ahem—ha!—pauperization of the East End, ha!—I would emphatically say that this scheme—ahem!—his lordship's untiring zeal for hum!—the welfare of—and so on. Ta dee dum da, ta, ra, rum dee. They always send on the agenda beforehand. That's all I want, and I'll lay you twenty to one I'll turn out as good a report as any of our rivals. You rely on me for that! I know exactly how debates go. At the worst I can always swop with another reporter—a prize distribution for an obituary, or a funeral for a concert."

"And do you really think we two between us can fill up the paper every week?" said Raphael doubtfully.

Little Sampson broke into a shriek of laughter, dropped his eyeglass and collapsed helplessly into the coal-scuttle. The Committeemen looked up from their confabulations in astonishment.

"Fill up the paper! Ho! Ho! Ho!" roared little Sampson, still doubled up. "Evidently you've never had anything to do with papers. Why, the reports of London and provincial sermons alone would fill three papers a week."

"Yes, but how are we to get these reports, especially from the provinces?"

"How? Ho! Ho! Ho!" And for some time little Sampson was physically incapable of speech. "Don't you know," he gasped, "that the ministers always send up their own sermons, pages upon pages of foolscap?"

"Indeed?" murmured Raphael.

"What, haven't you noticed all Jewish sermons are eloquent?".

"They write that themselves?"

"Of course; sometimes they put 'able,' and sometimes 'learned,' but, as a rule, they prefer to be 'eloquent.' The run on that epithet is tremendous. Ta dee dum da. In holiday seasons they are also very fond of 'enthralling the audience,' and of 'melting them to tears,' but this is chiefly during the Ten Days of Repentance, or when a boy is Barmitzvah. Then, think of the people who send in accounts of the oranges they gave away to distressed widows, or of the prizes won by their children at fourth-rate schools, or of the silver pointers they present to the synagogue. Whenever a reader sends a letter to an evening paper, he will want you to quote it; and, if he writes a paragraph in the obscurest leaflet, he will want you to note it as 'Literary Intelligence.' Why, my dear fellow, your chief task will be to cut down. Ta, ra, ra, ta! Any Jewish paper could be entirely supported by voluntary contributions—as, for the matter of that, could any newspaper in the world." He got up and shook the coal-dust languidly from his cloak.

"Besides, we shall all be helping you with articles," said De Haan, encouragingly.

"Yes, we shall all be helping you," said Ebenezer.

"I vill give you from the Pierian spring—bucketsful," said Pinchas in a flush of generosity.

"Thank you, I shall be much obliged," said Raphael, heartily, "for I don't quite see the use of a paper filled up as Mr. Sampson suggests." He flung his arms out and drew them in again. It was a way he had when in earnest. "Then, I should like to have some foreign news. Where's that to come from?"

"You rely on me for that," said little Sampson, cheerfully. "I will write at once to all the chief Jewish papers in the world, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, and American, asking them to exchange with us. There is never any dearth of foreign news. I translate a thing from the Italian Vessillo Israelitico, and the Israelitische Nieuwsbode copies it from us; Der Israelit then translates it into German, whence it gets into Hebrew, in Hamagid, thence into L'Univers Israelite, of Paris, and thence into the American Hebrew. When I see it in American, not having to translate it, it strikes me as fresh, and so I transfer it bodily to our columns, whence it gets translated into Italian, and so the merry-go-round goes eternally on. Ta dee rum day. You rely on me for your foreign news. Why, I can get you foreign telegrams if you'll only allow me to stick 'Trieste, December 21,' or things of that sort at the top. Ti, tum, tee ti." He went on humming a sprightly air, then, suddenly interrupting himself, he said, "but have you got an advertisement canvasser, Mr. De Haan?"

"No, not yet," said De Haan, turning around. The committee had resolved itself into animated groups, dotted about the office, each group marked by a smoke-drift. The clerks were still writing the ten thousand wrappers, swearing inaudibly.

"Well, when are you going to get him?"

"Oh, we shall have advertisements rolling in of themselves," said De Haan, with a magnificent sweep of the arm. "And we shall all assist in that department! Help yourself to another cigar, Sampson." And he passed Schlesinger's box. Raphael and Karlkammer were the only two men in the room not smoking cigars—Raphael, because he preferred his pipe, and Karlkammer for some more mystic reason.

"We must not ignore Cabalah," the zealot's voice was heard to observe.

"You can't get advertisements by Cabalah," drily interrupted Guedalyah, the greengrocer, a practical man, as everybody knew.

"No, indeed," protested Sampson. "The advertisement canvasser is a more important man than the editor."

Ebenezer pricked up his ears.

"I thought you undertook to do some canvassing for your money," said De Haan.

"So I will, so I will; rely on me for that. I shouldn't be surprised if I get the capitalists who are backing up my opera to give you the advertisements of the tour, and I'll do all I can in my spare time. But I feel sure you'll want another man—only, you must pay him well and give him a good commission. It'll pay best in the long run to have a good man, there are so many seedy duffers about," said little Sampson, drawing his faded cloak loftily around him. "You want an eloquent, persuasive man, with a gift of the gab—"

"Didn't I tell you so?" interrupted Pinchas, putting his finger to his nose. "I vill go to the advertisers and speak burning words to them. I vill—"

"Garn! They'd kick you out!" croaked Ebenezer. "They'll only listen to an Englishman." His coarse-featured face glistened with spite.

"My Ebenezer has a good appearance," said old Sugarman, "and his English is fine, and dat is half de battle."

Schlesinger, appealed to, intimated that Ebenezer might try, but that they could not well spare him any percentage at the start. After much haggling, Ebenezer consented to waive his commission, if the committee would consent to allow an original tale of his to appear in the paper.

The stipulation having been agreed to, he capered joyously about the office and winked periodically at Pinchas from behind the battery of his blue spectacles. The poet was, however, rapt in a discussion as to the best printer. The Committee were for having Gluck, who had done odd jobs for most of them, but Pinchas launched into a narrative of how, when he edited a great organ in Buda-Pesth, he had effected vast economies by starting a little printing-office of his own in connection with the paper.

"You vill set up a little establishment," he said. "I vill manage it for a few pounds a veek. Then I vill not only print your paper, I vill get you large profits from extra printing. Vith a man of great business talent at the head of it—"

De Haan made a threatening movement, and Pinchas edged away from the proximity of the coal-scuttle.

"Gluck's our printer!" said De Haan peremptorily. "He has Hebrew type. We shall want a lot of that. We must have a lot of Hebrew quotations—not spell Hebrew words in English like the other papers. And the Hebrew date must come before the English. The public must see at once that our principles are superior. Besides, Gluck's a Jew, which will save us from the danger of having any of the printing done on Saturdays."

"But shan't we want a publisher?" asked Sampson.

"That's vat I say," cried Pinchas. "If I set up this office, I can be your publisher too. Ve must do things business-like."

"Nonsense, nonsense! We are our own publishers," said De Haan. "Our clerks will send out the invoices and the subscription copies, and an extra office-boy can sell the papers across the counter."

Sampson smiled in his sleeve.

"All right. That will do—for the first number," he said cordially. "Ta ra ra ta."

"Now then, Mr. Leon, everything is settled," said De Haan, stroking his beard briskly. "I think I'll ask you to help us to draw up the posters. We shall cover all London, sir, all London."

"But wouldn't that be wasting money?" said Raphael.

"Oh, we're going to do the thing properly. I don't believe in meanness."

"It'll be enough if we cover the East End," said Schlesinger, drily.

"Quite so. The East End is London as far as we're concerned," said De Haan readily.

Raphael took the pen and the paper which De Haan tendered him and wrote The Flag of Judah, the title having been fixed at their first interview.

"The only orthodox paper!" dictated De Haan. "Largest circulation of any Jewish paper in the world!"

"No, how can we say that?" said Raphael, pausing.

"No, of course not," said De Haan. "I was thinking of the subsequent posters. Look out for the first number—on Friday, January 1st. The best Jewish writers! The truest Jewish teachings! Latest Jewish news and finest Jewish stories. Every Friday. Twopence."

"Twopence?" echoed Raphael, looking up. "I thought you wanted to appeal to the masses. I should say it must be a penny."

"It will be a penny," said De Haan oracularly.

"We have thought it all over," interposed Gradkoski. "The first number will be bought up out of curiosity, whether at a penny or at twopence. The second will go almost as well, for people will be anxious to see how it compares with the first. In that number we shall announce that owing to the enormous success we have been able to reduce it to a penny; meantime we make all the extra pennies."

"I see," said Raphael dubiously.

"We must have Chochma" said De Haan. "Our sages recommend that."

Raphael still had his doubts, but he had also a painful sense of his lack of the "practical wisdom" recommended by the sages cited. He thought these men were probably in the right. Even religion could not be pushed on the masses without business methods, and so long as they were in earnest about the doctrines to be preached, he could even feel a dim admiration for their superior shrewdness in executing a task in which he himself would have hopelessly broken down. Raphael's mind was large; and larger by being conscious of its cloistral limitations. And the men were in earnest; not even their most intimate friends could call this into question.

"We are going to save London," De Haan put it in one of his dithyrambic moments. "Orthodoxy has too long been voiceless, and yet it is five-sixths of Judaea. A small minority has had all the say. We must redress the balance. We must plead the cause of the People against the Few."

Raphael's breast throbbed with similar hopes. His Messianic emotions resurged. Sugarman's solicitous request that he should buy a Hamburg Lottery Ticket scarcely penetrated his consciousness. Carrying the copy of the poster, he accompanied De Haan to Gluck's. It was a small shop in a back street with jargon-papers and hand-bills in the window and a pervasive heavy oleaginous odor. A hand-press occupied the centre of the interior, the back of which was partitioned of and marked "Private." Gluck came forward, grinning welcome. He wore an unkempt beard and a dusky apron.

"Can you undertake to print an eight-page paper?" inquired De Haan.

"If I can print at all, I can print anything," responded Gluck reproachfully. "How many shall you want?"

"It's the orthodox paper we've been planning so long," said De Haan evasively.

Gluck nodded his head.

"There are seventy thousand orthodox Jews in London alone," said De Haan, with rotund enunciation. "So you see what you may have to print. It'll be worth your while to do it extra cheap."

Gluck agreed readily, naming a low figure. After half an hour's discussion it was reduced by ten per cent.

"Good-bye, then," said De Haan. "So let it stand. We shall start with a thousand copies of the first number, but where we shall end, the Holy One, blessed be He, alone knows. I will now leave you and the editor to talk over the rest. To-day's Monday. We must have the first number out by Friday week. Can you do that, Mr. Leon?"

"Oh, that will be ample," said Raphael, shooting out his arms.

He did not remain of that opinion. Never had he gone through such an awful, anxious time, not even in his preparations for the stiffest exams. He worked sixteen hours a day at the paper. The only evening he allowed himself off was when he dined with Mrs. Henry Goldsmith and met Esther. First numbers invariably take twice as long to produce as second numbers, even in the best regulated establishments. All sorts of mysterious sticks and leads, and fonts and forms, are found wanting at the eleventh hour. As a substitute for gray hair-dye there is nothing in the market to compete with the production of first numbers. But in Gluck's establishment, these difficulties were multiplied by a hundred. Gluck spent a great deal of time in going round the corner to get something from a brother printer. It took an enormous time to get a proof of any article out of Gluck.

"My men are so careful," Gluck explained. "They don't like to pass anything till it's free from typos."

The men must have been highly disappointed, for the proofs were invariably returned bristling with corrections and having a highly hieroglyphic appearance. Then Gluck would go in and slang his men. He kept them behind the partition painted "Private."

The fatal Friday drew nearer and nearer. By Thursday not a single page had been made up. Still Gluck pointed out that there were only eight, and the day was long. Raphael had not the least idea in the world how to make up a paper, but about eleven little Sampson kindly strolled into Gluck's, and explained to his editor his own method of pasting the proofs on sheets of paper of the size of the pages. He even made up one page himself to a blithe vocal accompaniment. When the busy composer and acting-manager hurried off to conduct a rehearsal, Raphael expressed his gratitude warmly. The hours flew; the paper evolved as by geologic stages. As the fateful day wore on, Gluck was scarcely visible for a moment. Raphael was left alone eating his heart out in the shop, and solacing himself with huge whiffs of smoke. At immense intervals Gluck appeared from behind the partition bearing a page or a galley slip. He said his men could not be trusted to do their work unless he was present. Raphael replied that he had not seen the compositors come through the shop to get their dinners, and he hoped Gluck would not find it necessary to cut off their meal-times. Gluck reassured him on this point; he said his men were so loyal that they preferred to bring their food with them rather than have the paper delayed. Later on he casually mentioned that there was a back entrance. He would not allow Raphael to talk to his workmen personally, arguing that it spoiled their discipline. By eleven o'clock at night seven pages had been pulled and corrected: but the eighth page was not forthcoming. The Flag had to be machined, dried, folded, and a number of copies put into wrappers and posted by three in the morning. The situation looked desperate. At a quarter to twelve, Gluck explained that a column of matter already set up had been "pied" by a careless compositor. It happened to be the column containing the latest news and Raphael had not even seen a proof of it. Still, Gluck conjured him not to trouble further: he would give his reader strict injunctions not to miss the slightest error. Raphael had already seen and passed the first column of this page, let him leave it to Gluck to attend to this second column; all would be well without his remaining later, and he would receive a copy of the Flag by the first post. The poor editor, whose head was splitting, weakly yielded; he just caught the midnight train to the West End and he went to bed feeling happy and hopeful.

At seven o'clock the next morning the whole Leon household was roused by a thunderous double rat-tat at the door. Addie was even heard to scream. A housemaid knocked at Raphael's door and pushed a telegram under it. Raphael jumped out of bed and read: "Third of column more matter wanted. Come at once. Gluck."

"How can that be?" he asked himself in consternation. "If the latest news made a column when it was first set up before the accident, how can it make less now?"

He dashed up to Gluck's office in a hansom and put the conundrum to him.

"You see we had no time to distribute the 'pie,' and we had no more type of that kind, so we had to reset it smaller," answered Gluck glibly. His eyes were blood-shot, his face was haggard. The door of the private compartment stood open.

"Your men are not come yet, I suppose," said Raphael.

"No," said Gluck. "They didn't go away till two, poor fellows. Is that the copy?" he asked, as Raphael handed him a couple of slips he had distractedly scribbled in the cab under the heading of "Talmudic Tales." "Thank you, it's just about the size. I shall have to set it myself."

"But won't we be terribly late?" said poor Raphael.

"We shall be out to-day," responded Gluck cheerfully. "We shall be in time for the Sabbath, and that's the important thing. Don't you see they're half-printed already?" He indicated a huge pile of sheets. Raphael examined them with beating heart. "We've only got to print 'em on the other side and the thing's done," said Gluck.

"Where are your machines?"

"There," said Gluck, pointing.

"That hand-press!" cried Raphael, astonished. "Do you mean to say you print them all with your own hand?"

"Why not?" said the dauntless Gluck. "I shall wrap them up for the post, too." And he shut himself up with the last of the "copy."

Raphael having exhausted his interest in the half-paper, fell to striding about the little shop, when who should come in but Pinchas, smoking a cigar of the Schlesinger brand.

"Ah, my Prince of Redacteurs," said Pinchas, darting at Raphael's hand and kissing it. "Did I not say you vould produce the finest paper in the kingdom? But vy have I not my copy by post? You must not listen to Ebenezer ven he says I must not be on the free list, the blackguard."

Raphael explained to the incredulous poet that Ebenezer had not said anything of the kind. Suddenly Pinchas's eye caught sight of the sheets. He swooped down upon them like a hawk. Then he uttered a shriek of grief.

"Vere's my poem, my great poesie?"

Raphael looked embarrassed.

"This is only half the paper," he said evasively.

"Ha, then it vill appear in the other half, hein?" he said with hope tempered by a terrible suspicion.

"N—n—o," stammered Raphael timidly.

"No?" shrieked Pinchas.

"You see—the—fact is, it wouldn't scan. Your Hebrew poetry is perfect, but English poetry is made rather differently and I've been too busy to correct it."

"But it is exactly like Lord Byron's!" shrieked Pinchas. "Mein Gott! All night I lie avake—vaiting for the post. At eight o'clock the post comes—but The Flag of Judah she vaves not! I rush round here—and now my beautiful poem vill not appear." He seized the sheet again, then cried fiercely: "You have a tale, 'The Waters of Babylon,' by Ebenezer the fool-boy, but my poesie have you not. Gott in Himmel!" He tore the sheet frantically across and rushed from the shop. In five minutes he reappeared. Raphael was absorbed in reading the last proof. Pinchas plucked timidly at his coat-tails.

"You vill put it in next veek?" he said winningly.

"I dare say," said Raphael gently.

"Ah, promise me. I vill love you like a brother, I vill be grateful to you for ever and ever. I vill never ask another favor of you in all my life. Ve are already like brothers—hein? I and you, the only two men—"

"Yes, yes," interrupted Raphael, "it shall appear next week."

"God bless you!" said Pinchas, kissing Raphael's coat-tails passionately and rushing without.

Looking up accidentally some minutes afterwards, Raphael was astonished to see the poet's carneying head thrust through the half-open door with a finger laid insinuatingly on the side of the nose. The head was fixed there as if petrified, waiting to catch the editor's eye.

The first number of The Flag of Judah appeared early in the afternoon.



CHAPTER IV.

THE TROUBLES OF AN EDITOR.

The new organ did not create a profound impression. By the rival party it was mildly derided, though many fair-minded persons were impressed by the rather unusual combination of rigid orthodoxy with a high spiritual tone and Raphael's conception of Judaism as outlined in his first leader, his view of it as a happy human compromise between an empty unpractical spiritualism and a choked-up over-practical formalism, avoiding the opposite extremes of its offshoots, Christianity and Mohammedanism, was novel to many of his readers, unaccustomed to think about their faith. Dissatisfied as Raphael was with the number, he felt he had fluttered some of the dove-cotes at least. Several people of taste congratulated him during Saturday and Sunday, and it was with a continuance of Messianic emotions and with agreeable anticipations that he repaired on Monday morning to the little den which had been inexpensively fitted up for him above the offices of Messrs. Schlesinger and De Haan. To his surprise he found it crammed with the committee; all gathered round little Sampson, who, with flushed face and cloak tragically folded, was expostulating at the top of his voice. Pinchas stood at the back in silent amusement. As Raphael entered jauntily, from a dozen lips, the lowering faces turned quickly towards him. Involuntarily Raphael started back in alarm, then stood rooted to the threshold. There was a dread ominous silence. Then the storm burst.

"Du Shegetz! Du Pasha Yisroile!" came from all quarters of the compass.

To be called a graceless Gentile and a sinner in Israel is not pleasant to a pious Jew: but all Raphael's minor sensations were swallowed up in a great wonderment.

"We are ruined!" moaned the furniture-dealer, who was always failing.

"You have ruined us!" came the chorus from the thick, sensuous lips, and swarthy fists were shaken threateningly. Sugarman's hairy paw was almost against his face. Raphael turned cold, then a rush of red-hot blood flooded his veins. He put out his good right hand and smote the nearest fist aside. Sugarman blenched and skipped back and the line of fists wavered.

"Don't be fools, gentlemen," said De Haan, his keen sense of humor asserting itself. "Let Mr. Leon sit down."

Raphael, still dazed, took his seat on the editorial chair. "Now, what can I do for you?" he said courteously. The fists dropped at his calm.

"Do for us," said Schlesinger drily. "You've done for the paper. It's not worth twopence."

"Well, bring it out at a penny at once then," laughed little Sampson, reinforced by the arrival of his editor.

Guedalyah the greengrocer glowered at him.

"I am very sorry, gentlemen, I have not been able to satisfy you," said Raphael. "But in a first number one can't do much."

"Can't they?" said De Haan. "You've done so much damage to orthodoxy that we don't know whether to go on with the paper."

"You're joking," murmured Raphael.

"I wish I was," laughed De Haan bitterly.

"But you astonish me." persisted Raphael. "Would you be so good as to point out where I have gone wrong?"

"With pleasure. Or rather with pain," said De Haan. Each of the committee drew a tattered copy from his pocket, and followed De Haan's demonstration with a murmured accompaniment of lamentation.

"The paper was founded to inculcate the inspection of cheese, the better supervision of the sale of meat, the construction of ladies' baths, and all the principles of true Judaism," said De Haan gloomily, "and there's not one word about these things, but a great deal about spirituality and the significance of the ritual. But I will begin at the beginning. Page 1—"

"But that's advertisements," muttered Raphael.

"The part surest to be read! The very first line of the paper is simply shocking. It reads:

"Death: On the 59th ult., at 22 Buckley St., the Rev. Abraham Barnett, in his fifty-fourth—"

"But death is always shocking; what's wrong about that?" interposed little Sampson.

"Wrong!" repeated De Haan, witheringly. "Where did you get that from? That was never sent in."

"No, of course not," said the sub-editor. "But we had to have at least one advertisement of that kind; just to show we should be pleased to advertise our readers' deaths. I looked in the daily papers to see if there were any births or marriages with Jewish names, but I couldn't find any, and that was the only Jewish-sounding death I could see."

"But the Rev. Abraham Barnett was a Meshumad," shrieked Sugarman the Shadchan. Raphael turned pale. To have inserted an advertisement about an apostate missionary was indeed terrible. But little Sampson's audacity did not desert him.

"I thought the orthodox party would be pleased to hear of the death of a Meshumad," he said suavely, screwing his eyeglass more tightly into its orbit, "on the same principle that anti-Semites take in the Jewish papers to hear of the death of Jews."

For a moment De Haan was staggered. "That would be all very well," he said; "let him be an atonement for us all, but then you've gone and put 'May his soul he bound up in the bundle of life.'"

It was true. The stock Hebrew equivalent for R.I.P. glared from the page.

"Fortunately, that taking advertisement of kosher trousers comes just underneath," said De Haan, "and that may draw off the attention. On page 2 you actually say in a note that Rabbenu Bachja's great poem on repentance should be incorporated in the ritual and might advantageously replace the obscure Piyut by Kalir. But this is rank Reform—it's worse than the papers we come to supersede."

"But surely you know it is only the Printing Press that has stereotyped our liturgy, that for Maimonides and Ibn Ezra, for David Kimchi and Joseph Albo, the contents were fluid, that—"

"We don't deny that," interrupted Schlesinger drily. "But we can't have any more alterations now-a-days. Who is there worthy to alter them? You?"

"Certainly not. I merely suggest."

"You are playing into the hands of our enemies," said De Haan, shaking his head. "We must not let our readers even imagine that the prayer-book can be tampered with. It's the thin end of the wedge. To trim our liturgy is like trimming living flesh; wherever you cut, the blood oozes. The four cubits of the Halacha—that is what is wanted, not changes in the liturgy. Once touch anything, and where are you to stop? Our religion becomes a flux. Our old Judaism is like an old family mansion, where each generation has left a memorial and where every room is hallowed with traditions of merrymaking and mourning. We do not want our fathers' home decorated in the latest style; the next step will be removal to a new dwelling altogether. On page 3 you refer to the second Isaiah."

"But I deny that there were two Isaiahs."

"So you do; but it is better for our readers not to hear of such impious theories. The space would be much better occupied in explaining the Portion for the week. The next leaderette has a flippant tone, which has excited unfavorable comment among some of the most important members of the Dalston Synagogue. They object to humor in a religious paper. On page 4 you have deliberately missed an opportunity of puffing the Kosher Co-operative Society. Indeed, there is not a word throughout about our Society. But I like Mr. Henry Goldsmith's letter on this page, though; he is a good orthodox man and he writes from a good address. It will show we are not only read in the East End. Pity he's such a Man-of-the-Earth, though. Yes, and that's good—the communication from the Rev. Joseph Strelitski. I think he's a bit of an Epikouros but it looks as if the whole of the Kensington Synagogue was with us. I understand he is a friend of yours: it will be as well for you to continue friendly. Several of us here knew him well in Olov Hasholom times, but he is become so grand and rarely shows himself at the Holy Land League Meetings. He can help us a lot if he will."

"Oh, I'm sure he will," said Raphael.

"That's good," said De Haan, caressing his white beard. Then growing gloomy again, he went on, "On page 5 you have a little article by Gabriel Hamburg, a well-known Epikouros."

"Oh, but he's one of the greatest scholars in Europe!" broke in Raphael. "I thought you'd be extra pleased to have it. He sent it to me from Stockholm as a special favor." He did not mention he had secretly paid for it. "I know some of his views are heterodox, and I don't agree with half he says, but this article is perfectly harmless."

"Well, let it pass—very few of our readers have ever heard of him. But on the same page you have a Latin quotation. I don't say there's anything wrong in that, but it smacks of Reform. Our readers don't understand it and it looks as if our Hebrew were poor. The Mishna contains texts suited for all purposes. We are in no need of Roman writers. On page 6 you speak of the Reform Shool, as if it were to be reasoned with. Sir, if we mention these freethinkers at all, it must be in the strongest language. By worshipping bare-headed and by seating the sexes together they have denied Judaism."

"Stop a minute!" interrupted Raphael warmly. "Who told you the Reformers do this?"

"Who told me, indeed? Why, it's common knowledge. That's how they've been going on for the last fifty years." "Everybody knows it," said the Committee in chorus.

"Has one of you ever been there?" said Raphael, rising in excitement.

"God forbid!" said the chorus.

"Well, I have, and it's a lie," said Raphael. His arms whirled round to the discomfort of the Committee.

"You ought not to have gone there," said Schlesinger severely. "Besides, will you deny they have the organ in their Sabbath services?"

"No, I won't!"

"Well, then!" said De Haan, triumphantly. "If they are capable of that, they are capable of any wickedness. Orthodox people can have nothing to do with them."

"But orthodox immigrants take their money," said Raphael.

"Their money is kosher', they are tripha," said De Haan sententiously. "Page 7, now we get to the most dreadful thing of all!" A solemn silence fell on the room, Pinchas sniggered unobtrusively.

"You have a little article headed, 'Talmudic Tales.' Why in heaven's name you couldn't have finished the column with bits of news I don't know. Satan himself must have put the thought into your head. Just at the end of the paper, too! For I can't reckon page 8, which is simply our own advertisement."

"I thought it would be amusing," said Raphael.

"Amusing! If you had simply told the tales, it might have been. But look how you introduce them! 'These amusing tales occur in the fifth chapter of Baba Bathra, and are related by Rabbi Bar Bar Channah. Our readers will see that they are parables or allegories rather than actual facts.'"

"But do you mean to say you look upon them as facts?" cried Raphael, sawing the air wildly and pacing about on the toes of the Committee.

"Surely!" said De Haan, while a low growl at his blasphemous doubts ran along the lips of the Committee.

"Was it treacherously to undermine Judaism that you so eagerly offered to edit for nothing?" said the furniture-dealer who was always failing.

"But listen here!" cried Raphael, exasperated. "Harmez, the son of Lilith, a demon, saddled two mules and made them stand on opposite sides of the River Doneg. He then jumped from the back of one to that of the other. He had, at the time, a cup of wine in each hand, and as he jumped, he threw the wine from each cup into the other without spilling a drop, although a hurricane was blowing at the time. When the King of demons heard that Harmez had been thus showing off to mortals, he slew him. Does any of you believe that?"

"Vould our Sages (their memories for a blessing) put anything into the Talmud that vasn't true?" queried Sugarman. "Ve know there are demons because it stands that Solomon knew their language."

"But then, what about this?" pursued Raphael. "'I saw a frog which was as big as the district of Akra Hagronia. A sea-monster came and swallowed the frog, and a raven came and ate the sea-monster. The raven then went and perched on a tree' Consider how strong that tree must have been. R. Papa ben Samuel remarks, 'Had I not been present, I should not have believed it.' Doesn't this appendix about ben Samuel show that it was never meant to be taken seriously?"

"It has some high meaning we do not understand in these degenerate times," said Guedalyah the greengrocer. "It is not for our paper to weaken faith in the Talmud."

"Hear, hear!" said De Haan, while "Epikouros" rumbled through the air, like distant thunder.

"Didn't I say an Englishman could never master the Talmud?" Sugarman asked in triumph.

This reminder of Raphael's congenital incompetence softened their minds towards him, so that when he straightway resigned his editorship, their self-constituted spokesman besought him to remain. Perhaps they remembered, too, that he was cheap.

"But we must all edit the paper," said De Haan enthusiastically, when peace was re-established. "We must have meetings every day and every article must he read aloud before it is printed."

Little Sampson winked cynically, passing his hand pensively through his thick tangled locks, but Raphael saw no objection to the arrangement. As before, he felt his own impracticability borne in upon him, and he decided to sacrifice himself for the Cause as far as conscience permitted. Excessive as it was the zeal of these men, it was after all in the true groove. His annoyance returned for a while, however, when Sugarman the Shadchan seized the auspicious moment of restored amity to inquire insinuatingly if his sister was engaged. Pinchas and little Sampson went down the stairs, quivering with noiseless laughter, which became boisterous when they reached the street. Pinchas was in high feather.

"The fool-men!" he said, as he led the sub-editor into a public-house and regaled him on stout and sandwiches. "They believe any Narrischkeit. I and you are the only two sensible Jews in England. You vill see that my poesie goes in next week—promise me that! To your life!" here they touched glasses. "Ah, it is beautiful poesie. Such high tragic ideas! You vill kiss me when you read them!" He laughed in childish light-heartedness. "Perhaps I write you a comic opera for your company—hein? Already I love you like a brother. Another glass stout? Bring us two more, thou Hebe of the hops-nectar. You have seen my comedy 'The Hornet of Judah'—No?—Ah, she vas a great comedy, Sampson. All London talked of her. She has been translated into every tongue. Perhaps I play in your company. I am a great actor—hein? You know not my forte is voman's parts—I make myself so lovely complexion vith red paint, I fall in love vith me." He sniggered over his stout. "The Redacteur vill not redact long, hein?" he said presently. "He is a fool-man. If he work for nothing they think that is what he is worth. They are orthodox, he, he!"

"But he is orthodox too," said little Sampson.

"Yes," replied Pinchas musingly. "It is strange. It is very strange. I cannot understand him. Never in all my experience have I met another such man. There vas an Italian exile I talked vith once in the island of Chios, his eyes were like Leon's, soft vith a shining splendor like the stars vich are the eyes of the angels of love. Ah, he is a good man, and he writes sharp; he has ideas, not like an English Jew at all. I could throw my arms round him sometimes. I love him like a brother." His voice softened. "Another glass stout; ve vill drink to him."

Raphael did not find the editing by Committee feasible. The friction was incessant, the waste of time monstrous. The second number cost him even more headaches than the first, and this, although the gallant Gluck abandoning his single-handed emprise fortified himself with a real live compositor and had arranged for the paper to be printed by machinery. The position was intolerable. It put a touch of acid into his dulciferous mildness! Just before going to press he was positively rude to Pinchas. It would seem that little Sampson sheltering himself behind his capitalists had refused to give the poet a commission for a comic opera, and Pinchas raved at Gideon, M.P., who he was sure was Sampson's financial backer, and threatened to shoot him and danced maniacally about the office.

"I have written an attack on the Member for Vitechapel," he said, growing calmer, "to hand him down to the execration of posterity, and I have brought it to the Flag. It must go in this veek."

"We have already your poem," said Raphael.

"I know, but I do not grudge my work, I am not like your money-making English Jews."

"There is no room. The paper is full."

"Leave out Ebenezer's tale—with the blue spectacles."

"There is none. It was completed in one number."

"Well, must you put in your leader?"

"Absolutely; please go away. I have this page to read."

"But you can leave out some advertisements?"

"I must not. We have too few as it is."

The poet put his finger alongside his nose, but Raphael was adamant.

"Do me this one favor," he pleaded. "I love you like a brother; just this one little thing. I vill never ask another favor of you all my life."

"I would not put it in, even if there was room. Go away," said Raphael, almost roughly.

The unaccustomed accents gave Pinchas a salutary shock. He borrowed two shillings and left, and Raphael was afraid to look up lest he should see his head wedged in the doorway. Soon after Gluck and his one compositor carried out the forms to be machined. Little Sampson, arriving with a gay air on his lips, met them at the door.

On the Friday, Raphael sat in the editorial chair, utterly dispirited, a battered wreck. The Committee had just left him. A heresy had crept into a bit of late news not inspected by them, and they declared that the paper was not worth twopence and had better be stopped. The demand for this second number was, moreover, rather poor, and each man felt his ten pound share melting away, and resolved not to pay up the half yet unpaid. It was Raphael's first real experience of men—after the enchanted towers of Oxford, where he had foregathered with dreamers.

His pipe hung listless in his mouth; an extinct volcano. His first fit of distrust in human nature, nay, even in the purifying powers of orthodoxy, was racking him. Strangely enough this wave of scepticism tossed up the thought of Esther Ansell, and stranger still on the top of this thought, in walked Mr. Henry Goldsmith. Raphael jumped up and welcomed his late host, whose leathery countenance shone with the polish of a sweet smile. It appeared that the communal pillar had been passing casually, and thought he'd look Raphael up.

"So you don't pull well together," he said, when he had elicited an outline of the situation from the editor.

"No, not altogether," admitted Raphael.

"Do you think the paper'll live?"

"I can't say," said Raphael, dropping limply into his chair. "Even if it does. I don't know whether it will do much good if run on their lines, for although it is of great importance that we get kosher food and baths. I hardly think they go about it in the right spirit. I may be wrong. They are older men than I and have seen more of actual life, and know the class we appeal to better."

"No, no, you are not wrong," said Mr. Goldsmith vehemently. "I am myself dissatisfied with some of the Committee's contributions to this second number. It is a great opportunity to save English Judaism, but it is being frittered away."

"I am afraid it is," said Raphael, removing his empty pipe from his mouth, and staring at it blankly.

Mr. Goldsmith brought his fist down sharp on the soft litter that covered the editorial table.

"It shall not be frittered away!" he cried. "No, not if I have to buy the paper!"

Raphael looked up eagerly.

"What do you say?" said Goldsmith. "Shall I buy it up and let you work it on your lines?"

"I shall be very glad," said Raphael, the Messianic look returning to his face.

"How much will they want for it?"

"Oh, I think they'll be glad to let you take it over. They say it's not worth twopence, and I'm sure they haven't got the funds to carry it on," replied Raphael, rising. "I'll go down about it at once. The Committee have just been here, and I dare say they are still in Schlesinger's office."

"No, no," said Goldsmith, pushing him down into his seat. "It will never do if people know I'm the proprietor."

"Why not?"

"Oh, lots of reasons. I'm not a man to brag; if I want to do a good thing for Judaism, there's no reason for all the world to know it. Then again, from my position on all sorts of committees I shall be able to influence the communal advertisements in a way I couldn't if people knew I had any connection with the paper. So, too, I shall be able to recommend it to my wealthy friends (as no doubt it will deserve to be recommended) without my praise being discounted."

"Well, but then what am I to say to the Committee?"

"Can't you say you want to buy it for yourself? They know you can afford it."

Raphael hesitated. "But why shouldn't I buy it for myself?"

"Pooh! Haven't you got better use for your money?"

It was true. Raphael had designs more tangibly philanthropic for the five thousand pounds left him by his aunt. And he was business-like enough to see that Mr. Goldsmith's money might as well be utilized for the good of Judaism. He was not quite easy about the little fiction that would he necessary for the transaction, but the combined assurances of Mr. Goldsmith and his own common sense that there was no real deception or harm involved in it, ultimately prevailed. Mr. Goldsmith left, promising to call again in an hour, and Raphael, full of new hopes, burst upon the Committee.

But his first experience of bargaining was no happier than the rest of his worldly experience. When he professed his willingness to relieve them of the burden of carrying on the paper they first stared, then laughed, then shook their fists. As if they would leave him to corrupt the Faith! When they understood he was willing to pay something, the value of The Flag of Judah went up from less than twopence to more than two hundred pounds. Everybody was talking about it, its reputation was made, they were going to print double next week.

"But it has not cost you forty pounds yet?" said the astonished Raphael.

"What are you saying? Look at the posters alone!" said Sugarman.

"But you don't look at it fairly," argued De Haan, whose Talmudical studies had sharpened wits already super-subtle. "Whatever it has cost us, it would have cost as much more if we had had to pay our editor, and it is very unfair of you to leave that out of account."

Raphael was overwhelmed. "It's taking away with the left hand what you gave us with the right," added De Haan, with infinite sadness. "I had thought better of you, Mr. Leon."

"But you got a good many twopences back," murmured Raphael.

"It's the future profits that we're losing," explained Schlesinger.

In the end Raphael agreed to give a hundred pounds, which made the members inwardly determine to pay up the residue on their shares at once. De Haan also extorted a condition that the Flag should continue to be the organ of the Kosher Co-operative Society, for at least six months, doubtless perceiving that should the paper live and thrive over that period, it would not then pay the proprietor to alter its principles. By which bargain the Society secured for itself a sum of money together with an organ, gratis, for six months and, to all seeming, in perpetuity, for at bottom they knew well that Raphael's heart was sound. They were all on the free list, too, and they knew he would not trouble to remove them.

Mr. Henry Goldsmith, returning, was rather annoyed at the price, but did not care to repudiate his agent.

"Be economical," he said. "I will get you a better office and find a proper publisher and canvasser. But cut it as close as you can."

Raphael's face beamed with joy. "Oh, depend upon me," he said.

"What is your own salary?" asked Goldsmith.

"Nothing," said Raphael.

A flash passed across Goldsmith's face, then he considered a moment.

"I wish you would let it be a guinea," he said. "Quite nominal, you know. Only I like to have things in proper form. And if you ever want to go, you know, you'll give me a month's notice and," here he laughed genially, "I'll do ditto when I want to get rid of you. Ha! Ha! Ha! Is that a bargain?"

Raphael smiled in reply and the two men's hands met in a hearty clasp.

"Miss Ansell will help you, I know," said Goldsmith cheerily. "That girl's got it in her, I can tell you. She'll take the shine out of some of our West Enders. Do you know I picked her out of the gutter, so to speak?"

"Yes, I know," said Raphael. "It was very good and discriminating of you. How is she?"

"She's all right. Come up and see her about doing something for you. She goes to the Museum sometimes in the afternoons, but you'll always find her in on Sundays, or most Sundays. Come up and dine with us again soon, will you? Mrs. Goldsmith will be so pleased."

"I will," said Raphael fervently. And when the door closed upon the communal pillar, he fell to striding feverishly about his little den. His trust in human nature was restored and the receding wave of scepticism bore off again the image of Esther Ansell. Now to work for Judaism!

The sub-editor made his first appearance that day, carolling joyously.

"Sampson," said Raphael abruptly, "your salary is raised by a guinea a week."

The joyous song died away on little Sampson's lips. His eyeglass dropped. He let himself fall backwards, impinging noiselessly upon a heap of "returns" of number one.



CHAPTER V.

A WOMAN'S GROWTH.

The sloppy Sunday afternoon, which was the first opportunity Raphael had of profiting by Mr. Henry Goldsmith's general invitation to call and see Esther, happened to be that selected by the worthy couple for a round of formal visits. Esther was left at home with a headache, little expecting pleasanter company. She hesitated about receiving Raphael, but on hearing that he had come to see her rather than her patrons, she smoothed her hair, put on a prettier frock, and went down into the drawing-room, where she found him striding restlessly in bespattered boots and moist overcoat. When he became aware of her presence, he went towards her eagerly, and shook her hand with jerky awkwardness.

"How are you?" he said heartily.

"Very well, thank you," she replied automatically. Then a twinge, as of reproach at the falsehood, darted across her brow, and she added, "A trifle of the usual headache. I hope you are well."

"Quite, thank you," he rejoined.

His face rather contradicted him. It looked thin, pale, and weary. Journalism writes lines on the healthiest countenance. Esther looked at him disapprovingly; she had the woman's artistic instinct if not the artist's, and Raphael, with his damp overcoat, everlastingly crumpled at the collar, was not an aesthetic object. Whether in her pretty moods or her plain, Esther was always neat and dainty. There was a bit of ruffled lace at her throat, and the heliotrope of her gown contrasted agreeably with the dark skin of the vivid face.

"Do take off your overcoat and dry yourself at the fire," she said.

While he was disposing of it, she poked the fire into a big cheerful blaze, seating herself opposite him in a capacious arm-chair, where the flame picked her out in bright tints upon the dusky background of the great dim room.

"And how is The Flag of Judah?" she said.

"Still waving," he replied. "It is about that that I have come."

"About that?" she said wonderingly. "Oh, I see; you want to know if the one person it is written at has read it. Well, make your mind easy. I have. I have read it religiously—No, I don't mean that; yes, I do; it's the appropriate word."

"Really?" He tried to penetrate behind the bantering tone.

"Yes, really. You put your side of the case eloquently and well. I look forward to Friday with interest. I hope the paper is selling?"

"So, so," he said. "It is uphill work. The Jewish public looks on journalism as a branch of philanthropy, I fear, and Sidney suggests publishing our free-list as a 'Jewish Directory.'"

She smiled. "Mr. Graham is very amusing. Only, he is too well aware of it. He has been here once since that dinner, and we discussed you. He says he can't understand how you came to be a cousin of his, even a second cousin. He says he is L'Homme qui rit, and you are L'Homme qui prie."

"He has let that off on me already, supplemented by the explanation that every extensive Jewish family embraces a genius and a lunatic. He admits that he is the genius. The unfortunate part for me," ended Raphael, laughing, "is, that he is a genius."

"I saw two of his little things the other day at the Impressionist Exhibition in Piccadilly. They are very clever and dashing."

"I am told he draws ballet-girls," said Raphael, moodily.

"Yes, he is a disciple of Degas."

"You don't like that style of art?" he said, a shade of concern in his voice.

"I do not," said Esther, emphatically. "I am a curious mixture. In art, I have discovered in myself two conflicting tastes, and neither is for the modern realism, which I yet admire in literature. I like poetic pictures, impregnated with vague romantic melancholy; and I like the white lucidity of classic statuary. I suppose the one taste is the offspring of temperament, the other of thought; for intellectually, I admire the Greek ideas, and was glad to hear you correct Sidney's perversion of the adjective. I wonder," she added, reflectively, "if one can worship the gods of the Greeks without believing in them."

"But you wouldn't make a cult of beauty?"

"Not if you take beauty in the narrow sense in which I should fancy your cousin uses the word; but, in a higher and broader sense, is it not the one fine thing in life which is a certainty, the one ideal which is not illusion?"

"Nothing is illusion," said Raphael, earnestly. "At least, not in your sense. Why should the Creator deceive us?"

"Oh well, don't let us get into metaphysics. We argue from different platforms," she said. "Tell me what you really came about in connection with the Flag."

"Mr. Goldsmith was kind enough to suggest that you might write for it."

"What!" exclaimed Esther, sitting upright in her arm-chair. "I? I write for an orthodox paper?"

"Yes, why not?"

"Do you mean I'm to take part in my own conversion?"

"The paper is not entirely religious," he reminded her.

"No, there are the advertisements." she said slily.

"Pardon me," he said. "We don't insert any advertisements contrary to the principles of orthodoxy. Not that we are much tempted."

"You advertise soap," she murmured.

"Oh, please! Don't you go in for those cheap sarcasms."

"Forgive me," she said. "Remember my conceptions of orthodoxy are drawn mainly from the Ghetto, where cleanliness, so far from being next to godliness, is nowhere in the vicinity. But what can I do for you?"

"I don't know. At present the staff, the Flag-staff as Sidney calls it, consists of myself and a sub-editor, who take it in turn to translate the only regular outside contributor's articles into English."

"Who's that?"

"Melchitsedek Pinchas, the poet I told you of."

"I suppose he writes in Hebrew."

"No, if he did the translation would be plain sailing enough. The trouble is that he will write in English. I must admit, though, he improves daily. Our correspondents, too, have the same weakness for the vernacular, and I grieve to add that when they do introduce a Hebrew word, they do not invariably spell it correctly."

She smiled; her smile was never so fascinating as by firelight.

Raphael rose and paced the room nervously, flinging out his arms in uncouth fashion to emphasize his speech.

"I was thinking you might introduce a secular department of some sort which would brighten up the paper. My articles are so plaguy dull."

"Not so dull, for religious articles," she assured him.

"Could you treat Jewish matters from a social standpoint—gossipy sort of thing."

She shook her head. "I'm afraid to trust myself to write on Jewish subjects. I should be sure to tread on somebody's corns."

"Oh, I have it!" he cried, bringing his arms in contact with a small Venetian vase which Esther, with great presence of mind, just managed to catch ere it reached the ground.

"No, I have it," she said, laughing. "Do sit down, else nobody can answer for the consequences."

She half pushed him into his chair, where he fell to warming his hands contemplatively.

"Well?" she said after a pause. "I thought you had an idea."

"Yes, yes," he said, rousing himself. "The subject we were just discussing—Art."

"But there is nothing Jewish about art."

"All noble work has its religious aspects. Then there are Jewish artists."

"Oh yes! your contemporaries do notice their exhibits, and there seem to be more of them than the world ever hears of. But if I went to a gathering for you how should I know which were Jews?"

"By their names, of course."

"By no means of course. Some artistic Jews have forgotten their own names."

"That's a dig at Sidney."

"Really, I wasn't thinking of him for the moment," she said a little sharply. "However, in any case there's nothing worth doing till May, and that's some months ahead. I'll do the Academy for you if you like."

"Thank you. Won't Sidney stare if you pulverize him in The Flag of Judah? Some of the pictures have also Jewish subjects, you know."

"Yes, but if I mistake not, they're invariably done by Christian artists."

"Nearly always," he admitted pensively. "I wish we had a Jewish allegorical painter to express the high conceptions of our sages."

"As he would probably not know what they are,"—she murmured. Then, seeing him rise as if to go, she said: "Won't you have a cup of tea?"

"No, don't trouble," he answered.

"Oh yes, do!" she pleaded. "Or else I shall think you're angry with me for not asking you before." And she rang the bell. She discovered, to her amusement, that Raphael took two pieces of sugar per cup, but that if they were not inserted, he did not notice their absence. Over tea, too, Raphael had a new idea, this time fraught with peril to the Sevres tea-pot.

"Why couldn't you write us a Jewish serial story?" he said suddenly. "That would be a novelty in communal journalism."

Esther looked startled by the proposition.

"How do you know I could?" she said after a silence.

"I don't know," he replied. "Only I fancy you could. Why not?" he said encouragingly. "You don't know what you can do till you try. Besides you write poetry."

"The Jewish public doesn't like the looking-glass," she answered him, shaking her head.

"Oh, you can't say that. They've only objected as yet to the distorting mirror. You're thinking of the row over that man Armitage's book. Now, why not write an antidote to that book? There now, there's an idea for you."

"It is an idea!" said Esther with overt sarcasm. "You think art can be degraded into an antidote."

"Art is not a fetish," he urged. "What degradation is there in art teaching a noble lesson?"

"Ah, that is what you religious people will never understand," she said scathingly. "You want everything to preach."

"Everything does preach something," he retorted. "Why not have the sermon good?"

"I consider the original sermon was good," she said defiantly. "It doesn't need an antidote."

"How can you say that? Surely, merely as one who was born a Jewess, you wouldn't care for the sombre picture drawn by this Armitage to stand as a portrait of your people."

She shrugged her shoulders—the ungraceful shrug of the Ghetto. "Why not? It is one-sided, but it is true."

"I don't deny that; probably the man was sincerely indignant at certain aspects. I am ready to allow he did not even see he was one-sided. But if you see it, why not show the world the other side of the shield?"

She put her hand wearily to her brow.

"Do not ask me," she said. "To have my work appreciated merely because the moral tickled the reader's vanity would be a mockery. The suffrages of the Jewish public—I might have valued them once; now I despise them." She sank further back on the chair, pale and silent.

"Why, what harm have they done you?" he asked.

"They are so stupid," she said, with a gesture of distaste.

"That is a new charge against the Jews."

"Look at the way they have denounced this Armitage, saying his book is vulgar and wretched and written for gain, and all because it does not flatter them."

"Can you wonder at it? To say 'you're another' may not be criticism, but it is human nature."

Esther smiled sadly. "I cannot make you out at all," she said.

"Why? What is there strange about me?"

"You say such shrewd, humorous things sometimes; I wonder how you can remain orthodox."

"Now I can't understand you," he said, puzzled.

"Oh well. Perhaps if you could, you wouldn't be orthodox. Let us remain mutual enigmas. And will you do me a favor?"

"With pleasure," he said, his face lighting up.

"Don't mention Mr. Armitage's book to me again. I am sick of hearing about it."

"So am I," he said, rather disappointed. "After that dinner I thought it only fair to read it, and although I detect considerable crude power in it, still I am very sorry it was ever published. The presentation of Judaism is most ignorant. All the mystical yearnings of the heroine might have found as much satisfaction in the faith of her own race as they find expression in its poetry."

He rose to go. "Well, I am to take it for granted you will not write that antidote?"

"I'm afraid it would be impossible for me to undertake it," she said more mildly than before, and pressed her hand again to her brow.

"Pardon me," he said in much concern. "I am too selfish. I forgot you are not well. How is your head feeling now?"

"About the same, thank you," she said, forcing a grateful smile. "You may rely on me for art; yes, and music, too, if you like."

"Thank you," he said. "You read a great deal, don't you?"

She nodded her head. "Well, every week books are published of more or less direct Jewish interest. I should be glad of notes about such to brighten up the paper."

"For anything strictly unorthodox you may count on me. If that antidote turns up, I shall not fail to cackle over it in your columns. By the by, are you going to review the poison? Excuse so many mixed metaphors," she added, with a rather forced laugh.

"No, I shan't say anything about it. Why give it an extra advertisement by slating it?"

"Slating," she repeated with a faint smile. "I see you have mastered all the slang of your profession."

"Ah, that's the influence of my sub-editor," he said, smiling in return. "Well, good-bye."

"You're forgetting your overcoat," she said, and having smoothed out that crumpled collar, she accompanied him down the wide soft-carpeted staircase into the hall with its rich bronzes and glistening statues.

"How are your people in America?" he bethought himself to ask on the way down.

"They are very well, thank you," she said. "I send my brother Solomon The Flag of Judah. He is also, I am afraid, one of the unregenerate. You see I am doing my best to enlarge your congregation."

He could not tell whether it was sarcasm or earnest.

"Well, good-bye," he said, holding out his hand. "Thank you for your promise."

"Oh, that's not worth thanking me for," she said, touching his long white fingers for an instant. "Look at the glory of seeing myself in print. I hope you're not annoyed with me for refusing to contribute fiction," she ended, growing suddenly remorseful at the moment of parting.

"Of course not. How could I be?"

"Couldn't your sister Adelaide do you a story?"

"Addle?" he repeated laughing, "Fancy Addie writing stories! Addie has no literary ability."

"That's always the way with brothers. Solomon says—" She paused suddenly.

"I don't remember for the moment that Solomon has any proverb on the subject," he said, still amused at the idea of Addie as an authoress.

"I was thinking of something else. Good-bye. Remember me to your sister, please."

"Certainly," he said. Then he exclaimed, "Oh, what a block-head I am! I forgot to remember her to you. She says she would be so pleased if you would come and have tea and a chat with her some day. I should like you and Addie to know each other."

"Thanks, I will. I will write to her some day. Good-bye, once more."

He shook hands with her and fumbled at the door.

"Allow me!" she said, and opened it upon the gray dulness of the dripping street. "When may I hope for the honor of another visit from a real live editor?"

"I don't know," he said, smiling. "I'm awfully busy, I have to read a paper on Ibn Ezra at Jews' College to-day fortnight."

"Outsiders admitted?" she asked.

"The lectures are for outsiders," he said. "To spread the knowledge of our literature. Only they won't come. Have you never been to one?"

She shook her head.

"There!" he said. "You complain of our want of culture, and you don't even know what's going on."

She tried to take the reproof with a smile, but the corners of her mouth quivered. He raised his hat and went down the steps.

She followed him a little way along the Terrace, with eyes growing dim with tears she could not account for. She went back to the drawing-room and threw herself into the arm-chair where he had sat, and made her headache worse by thinking of all her unhappiness. The great room was filling with dusk, and in the twilight pictures gathered and dissolved. What girlish dreams and revolts had gone to make that unfortunate book, which after endless boomerang-like returns from the publishers, had appeared, only to be denounced by Jewry, ignored by its journals and scantily noticed by outside criticisms. Mordecai Josephs had fallen almost still-born from the press; the sweet secret she had hoped to tell her patroness had turned bitter like that other secret of her dead love for Sidney, in the reaction from which she had written most of her book. How fortunate at least that her love had flickered out, had proved but the ephemeral sentiment of a romantic girl for the first brilliant man she had met. Sidney had fascinated her by his verbal audacities in a world of narrow conventions; he had for the moment laughed away spiritual aspirations and yearnings with a raillery that was almost like ozone to a young woman avid of martyrdom for the happiness of the world. How, indeed, could she have expected the handsome young artist to feel the magic that hovered about her talks with him, to know the thrill that lay in the formal hand-clasp, to be aware that he interpreted for her poems and pictures, and incarnated the undefined ideal of girlish day-dreams? How could he ever have had other than an intellectual thought of her; how could any man, even the religious Raphael? Sickly, ugly little thing that she was! She got up and looked in the glass now to see herself thus, but the shadows had gathered too thickly. She snatched up a newspaper that lay on a couch, lit it, and held it before the glass; it flared up threateningly and she beat it out, laughing hysterically and asking herself if she was mad. But she had seen the ugly little face; its expression frightened her. Yes, love was not for her; she could only love a man of brilliancy and culture, and she was nothing but a Petticoat Lane girl, after all. Its coarseness, its vulgarity underlay all her veneer. They had got into her book; everybody said so. Raphael said so. How dared she write disdainfully of Raphael's people? She an upstart, an outsider? She went to the library, lit the gas, got down a volume of Graetz's history of the Jews, which she had latterly taken to reading, and turned over its wonderful pages. Then she wandered restlessly back to the great dim drawing-room and played amateurish fantasias on the melancholy Polish melodies of her childhood till Mr. and Mrs. Henry Goldsmith returned. They had captured the Rev. Joseph Strelitski and brought him back to dinner, Esther would have excused herself from the meal, but Mrs. Goldsmith insisted the minister would think her absence intentionally discourteous. In point of fact, Mrs. Goldsmith, like all Jewesses a born match-maker, was not disinclined to think of the popular preacher as a sort of adopted son-in-law. She did not tell herself so, but she instinctively resented the idea of Esther marrying into the station of her patroness. Strelitski, though his position was one of distinction for a Jewish clergyman, was, like Esther, of humble origin; it would be a match which she could bless from her pedestal in genuine good-will towards both parties.

The fashionable minister was looking careworn and troubled. He had aged twice ten years since his outburst at the Holy Land League. The black curl hung disconsolately on his forehead. He sat at Esther's side, but rarely looking at her, or addressing her, so that her taciturnity and scarcely-veiled dislike did not noticeably increase his gloom. He rallied now and again out of politeness to his hostess, flashing out a pregnant phrase or two. But prosperity did not seem to have brought happiness to the whilom, poor Russian student, even though he had fought his way to it unaided.



CHAPTER VI.

COMEDY OR TRAGEDY?

The weeks went on and Passover drew nigh. The recurrence of the feast brought no thrill to Esther now. It was no longer a charmed time, with strange things to eat and drink, and a comparative plenty of them—stranger still. Lack of appetite was the chief dietary want now. Nobody had any best clothes to put on in a world where everything was for the best in the way of clothes. Except for the speckled Passover cakes, there was hardly any external symptom of the sacred Festival. While the Ghetto was turning itself inside out, the Kensington Terrace was calm in the dignity of continuous cleanliness. Nor did Henry Goldsmith himself go prowling about the house in quest of vagrant crumbs. Mary O'Reilly attended to all that, and the Goldsmiths had implicit confidence in her fidelity to the traditions of their faith. Wherefore, the evening of the day before Passover, instead of being devoted to frying fish and provisioning, was free for more secular occupations; Esther, for example, had arranged to go to see the debut of a new Hamlet with Addie. Addie had asked her to go, mentioned that Raphael, who was taking her, had suggested that she should bring her friend. For they had become great friends, had Addie and Esther, ever since Esther had gone to take that cup of tea, with the chat that is more essential than milk or sugar.

The girls met or wrote every week. Raphael, Esther never met nor heard from directly. She found Addie a sweet, lovable girl, full of frank simplicity and unquestioning piety. Though dazzlingly beautiful, she had none of the coquetry which Esther, with a touch of jealousy, had been accustomed to associate with beauty, and she had little of the petty malice of girlish gossip. Esther summed her up as Raphael's heart without his head. It was unfair, for Addie's own head was by no means despicable. But Esther was not alone in taking eccentric opinions as the touchstone of intellectual vigor. Anyhow, she was distinctly happier since Addie had come into her life, and she admired her as a mountain torrent might admire a crystal pool—half envying her happier temperament.

The Goldsmiths were just finishing dinner, when the expected ring came. To their surprise, the ringer was Sidney. He was shown into the dining-room.

"Good evening, all," he said. "I've come as a substitute for Raphael."

Esther grew white. "Why, what has happened to him?" she asked.

"Nothing, I had a telegram to say he was unexpectedly detained in the city, and asking me to take Addie and to call for you."

Esther turned from white to red. How rude of Raphael! How disappointing not to meet him, after all! And did he think she could thus unceremoniously be handed over to somebody else? She was about to beg to be excused, when it struck her a refusal would look too pointed. Besides, she did not fear Sidney now. It would be a test of her indifference. So she murmured instead, "What can detain him?"

"Charity, doubtless. Do you know, that after he is fagged out with upholding the Flag from early morning till late eve, he devotes the later eve to gratuitous tuition, lecturing and the like."

"No," said Esther, softened. "I knew he came home late, but I thought he had to report communal meetings."

"That, too. But Addie tells me he never came home at all one night last week. He was sitting up with some wretched dying pauper."

"He'll kill himself," said Esther, anxiously.

"People are right about him. He is quite hopeless," said Percy Saville, the solitary guest, tapping his forehead significantly.

"Perhaps it is we who are hopeless," said Esther, sharply.

"I wish we were all as sensible," said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, turning on the unhappy stockbroker with her most superior air. "Mr. Leon always reminds me of Judas Maccabaeus."

He shrank before the blaze of her mature beauty, the fulness of her charms revealed by her rich evening dress, her hair radiating strange, subtle perfume. His eye sought Mr. Goldsmith's for refuge and consolation.

"That is so," said Mr. Goldsmith, rubbing his red chin. "He is an excellent young man."

"May I trouble you to put on your things at once, Miss Ansell?" said Sidney. "I have left Addie in the carriage, and we are rather late. I believe it is usual for ladies to put on 'things,' even when in evening dress. I may mention that there is a bouquet for you in the carriage, and, however unworthy a substitute I may be for Raphael, I may at least claim he would have forgotten to bring you that."

Esther smiled despite herself as she left the room to get her cloak. She was chagrined and disappointed, but she resolved not to inflict her ill-humor on her companions.

She had long since got used to carriages, and when they arrived at the theatre, she took her seat in the box without heart-fluttering. It was an old discovery now that boxes had no connection with oranges nor stalls with costers' barrows.

The house was brilliant. The orchestra was playing the overture.

"I wish Mr. Shakspeare would write a new play," grumbled Sidney. "All these revivals make him lazy. Heavens! what his fees must tot up to! If I were not sustained by the presence of you two girls, I should no more survive the fifth act than most of the characters. Why don't they brighten the piece up with ballet-girls?"

"Yes, I suppose you blessed Mr. Leon when you got his telegram," said Esther. "What a bore it must be to you to be saddled with his duties!"

"Awful!" admitted Sidney gravely. "Besides, it interferes with my work."

"Work?" said Addie. "You know you only work by sunlight."

"Yes, that's the best of my profession—in England. It gives you such opportunities of working—at other professions."

"Why, what do you work at?" inquired Esther, laughing.

"Well, there's amusement, the most difficult of all things to achieve! Then there's poetry. You don't know what a dab I am at rondeaux and barcarolles. And I write music, too, lovely little serenades to my lady-loves and reveries that are like dainty pastels."

"All the talents!" said Addie, looking at him with a fond smile. "But if you have any time to spare from the curling of your lovely silken moustache, which is entirely like a delicate pastel, will you kindly tell me what celebrities are present?"

"Yes, do," added Esther, "I have only been to two first nights, and then I had nobody to point out the lions."

"Well, first of all I see a very celebrated painter in a box—a man who has improved considerably on the weak draughtsmanship displayed by Nature in her human figures, and the amateurishness of her glaring sunsets."

"Who's that?" inquired Addie and Esther eagerly.

"I think he calls himself Sidney Graham—but that of course is only a nom de pinceau."

"Oh!" said, the girls, with a reproachful smile.

"Do be serious!" said Esther. "Who is that stout gentleman with the bald head?" She peered down curiously at the stalls through her opera-glass.

"What, the lion without the mane? That's Tom Day, the dramatic critic of a dozen papers. A terrible Philistine. Lucky for Shakspeare he didn't flourish in Elizabethan times."

He rattled on till the curtain rose and the hushed audience settled down to the enjoyment of the tragedy.

"This looks as if it is going to be the true Hamlet," said Esther, after the first act.

"What do you mean by the true Hamlet?" queried Sidney cynically.

"The Hamlet for whom life is at once too big and too little," said Esther.

"And who was at once mad and sane," laughed Sidney. "The plain truth is that Shakspeare followed the old tale, and what you take for subtlety is but the blur of uncertain handling. Aha! You look shocked. Have I found your religion at last?"

"No; my reverence for our national bard is based on reason," rejoined Esther seriously. "To conceive Hamlet, the typical nineteenth-century intellect, in that bustling picturesque Elizabethan time was a creative feat bordering on the miraculous. And then, look at the solemn inexorable march of destiny in his tragedies, awful as its advance in the Greek dramas. Just as the marvels of the old fairy-tales were an instinctive prevision of the miracles of modern science, so this idea of destiny seems to me an instinctive anticipation of the formulas of modern science. What we want to-day is a dramatist who shall show us the great natural silent forces, working the weal and woe of human life through the illusions of consciousness and free will."

"What you want to-night, Miss Ansell, is black coffee," said Sidney, "and I'll tell the attendant to get you a cup, for I dragged you away from dinner before the crown and climax of the meal; I have always noticed myself that when I am interrupted in my meals, all sorts of bugbears, scientific or otherwise, take possession of my mind."

He called the attendant.

"Esther has the most nonsensical opinions," said Addie gravely. "As if people weren't responsible for their actions! Do good and all shall be well with thee, is sound Bible teaching and sound common sense."

"Yes, but isn't it the Bible that says, 'The fathers have eaten a sour grape and the teeth of the children are set on edge'?" Esther retorted.

Addie looked perplexed. "It sounds contradictory," she said honestly.

"Not at all, Addie," said Esther. "The Bible is a literature, not a book. If you choose to bind Tennyson and Milton in one volume that doesn't make them a book. And you can't complain if you find contradictions in the text. Don't you think the sour grape text the truer, Mr. Graham?"

"Don't ask me, please. I'm prejudiced against anything that appears in the Bible."

In his flippant way Sidney spoke the truth. He had an almost physical repugnance for his fathers' ways of looking at things.

"I think you're the two most wicked people in the world," exclaimed Addie gravely.

"We are," said Sidney lightly. "I wonder you consent to sit in the same box with us. How you can find my company endurable I can never make out."

Addie's lovely face flushed and her lip quivered a little.

"It's your friend who's the wickeder of the two," pursued Sidney. "For she's in earnest and I'm not. Life's too short for us to take the world's troubles on our shoulders, not to speak of the unborn millions. A little light and joy, the flush of sunset or of a lovely woman's face, a fleeting strain of melody, the scent of a rose, the flavor of old wine, the flash of a jest, and ah, yes, a cup of coffee—here's yours, Miss Ansell—that's the most we can hope for in life. Let us start a religion with one commandment: 'Enjoy thyself.'"

"That religion has too many disciples already," said Esther, stirring her coffee.

"Then why not start it if you wish to reform the world," asked Sidney. "All religions survive merely by being broken. With only one commandment to break, everybody would jump at the chance. But so long as you tell people they mustn't enjoy themselves, they will, it's human nature, and you can't alter that by Act of Parliament or Confession of Faith. Christ ran amuck at human nature, and human nature celebrates his birthday with pantomimes."

"Christ understood human nature better than the modern young man," said Esther scathingly, "and the proof lies in the almost limitless impress he has left on history."

"Oh, that was a fluke," said Sidney lightly. "His real influence is only superficial. Scratch the Christian and you find the Pagan—spoiled."

"He divined by genius what science is slowly finding out," said Esther, "when he said, 'Forgive them for they know not what they do'!—"

Sidney laughed heartily. "That seems to be your King Charles's head—seeing divinations of modern science in all the old ideas. Personally I honor him for discovering that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Strange he should have stopped half-way to the truth!"

"What is the truth?" asked Addie curiously.

"Why, that morality was made for man, not man for morality," said Sidney. "That chimera of meaningless virtue which the Hebrew has brought into the world is the last monster left to slay. The Hebrew view of life is too one-sided. The Bible is a literature without a laugh in it. Even Raphael thinks the great Radical of Galilee carried spirituality too far."

"Yes, he thinks he would have been reconciled to the Jewish doctors and would have understood them better," said Addie, "only he died so young."

"That's a good way of putting it!" said Sidney admiringly. "One can see Raphael is my cousin despite his religious aberrations. It opens up new historical vistas. Only it is just like Raphael to find excuses for everybody, and Judaism in everything. I am sure he considers the devil a good Jew at heart; if he admits any moral obliquity in him, he puts it down to the climate."

This made Esther laugh outright, even while there were tears for Raphael in the laugh. Sidney's intellectual fascination reasserted itself over her; there seemed something inspiring in standing with him on the free heights that left all the clogging vapors and fogs of moral problems somewhere below; where the sun shone and the clear wind blew and talk was a game of bowls with Puritan ideals for ninepins. He went on amusing her till the curtain rose, with a pretended theory of Mohammedology which he was working at. Just as for the Christian Apologist the Old Testament was full of hints of the New, so he contended was the New Testament full of foreshadowings of the Koran, and he cited as a most convincing text, "In Heaven, there shall be no marrying, nor giving in marriage." He professed to think that Mohammedanism was the dark horse that would come to the front in the race of religions and win in the west as it had won in the east.

"There's a man staring dreadfully at you, Esther," said Addie, when the curtain fell on the second act.

"Nonsense!" said Esther, reluctantly returning from the realities of the play to the insipidities of actual life. "Whoever it is, it must be at you."

She looked affectionately at the great glorious creature at her side, tall and stately, with that winning gentleness of expression which spiritualizes the most voluptuous beauty. Addie wore pale sea-green, and there were lilies of the valley at her bosom, and a diamond star in her hair. No man could admire her more than Esther, who felt quite vain of her friend's beauty and happy to bask in its reflected sunshine. Sidney followed her glance and his cousin's charms struck him with almost novel freshness. He was so much with Addie that he always took her for granted. The semi-unconscious liking he had for her society was based on other than physical traits. He let his eyes rest upon her for a moment in half-surprised appreciation, figuring her as half-bud, half-blossom. Really, if Addie had not been his cousin and a Jewess! She was not much of a cousin, when he came to cipher it out, but then she was a good deal of a Jewess!

"I'm sure it's you he's staring at," persisted Addie.

"Don't be ridiculous," persisted Esther. "Which man do you mean?"

"There! The fifth row of stalls, the one, two, four, seven, the seventh man from the end! He's been looking at you all through, but now he's gone in for a good long stare. There! next to that pretty girl in pink."

"Do you mean the young man with the dyed carnation in his buttonhole and the crimson handkerchief in his bosom?"

"Yes, that's the one. Do you know him?"

"No," said Esther, lowering her eyes and looking away. But when Addie informed her that the young man had renewed his attentions to the girl in pink, she levelled her opera-glass at him. Then she shook her head.

"There seems something familiar about his face, but I cannot for the life of me recall who it is."

"The something familiar about his face is his nose," said Addie laughing, "for it is emphatically Jewish."

"At that rate," said Sidney, "nearly half the theatre would be familiar, including a goodly proportion of the critics, and Hamlet and Ophelia themselves. But I know the fellow."

"You do? Who is he?" asked the girls eagerly.

"I don't know. He's one of the mashers of the Frivolity. I'm another, and so we often meet. But we never speak as we pass by. To tell the truth, I resent him."

"It's wonderful how fond Jews are of the theatre," said Esther, "and how they resent other Jews going."

"Thank you," said Sidney. "But as I'm not a Jew the arrow glances off."

"Not a Jew?" repeated Esther in amaze.

"No. Not in the current sense. I always deny I'm a Jew."

"How do you justify that?" said Addie incredulously.

"Because it would be a lie to say I was. It would be to produce a false impression. The conception of a Jew in the mind of the average Christian is a mixture of Fagin, Shylock, Rothschild and the caricatures of the American comic papers. I am certainly not like that, and I'm not going to tell a lie and say I am. In conversation always think of your audience. It takes two to make a truth. If an honest man told an old lady he was an atheist, that would be a lie, for to her it would mean he was a dissolute reprobate. To call myself 'Abrahams' would be to live a daily lie. I am not a bit like the picture called up by Abrahams. Graham is a far truer expression of myself."

"Extremely ingenious," said Esther smiling. "But ought you not rather to utilize yourself for the correction of the portrait of Abrahams?"

Sidney shrugged his shoulders. "Why should I subject myself to petty martyrdom for the sake of an outworn creed and a decaying sect?"

"We are not decaying," said Addie indignantly.

"Personally you are blossoming," said Sidney, with a mock bow. "But nobody can deny that our recent religious history has been a series of dissolving views. Look at that young masher there, who is still ogling your fascinating friend; rather, I suspect, to the annoyance of the young lady in pink, and compare him with the old hard-shell Jew. When I was a lad named Abrahams, painfully training in the way I wasn't going to go, I got an insight into the lives of my ancestors. Think of the people who built up the Jewish prayer-book, who added line to line and precept to precept, and whose whole thought was intertwined with religion, and then look at that young fellow with the dyed carnation and the crimson silk handkerchief, who probably drives a drag to the Derby, and for aught I know runs a music hall. It seems almost incredible he should come of that Puritan old stock."

"Not at all," said Esther. "If you knew more of our history, you would see it is quite normal. We were always hankering after the gods of the heathen, and we always loved magnificence; remember our Temples. In every land we have produced great merchants and rulers, prime-ministers, viziers, nobles. We built castles in Spain (solid ones) and palaces in Venice. We have had saints and sinners, free livers and ascetics, martyrs and money-lenders. Polarity, Graetz calls the self-contradiction which runs through our history. I figure the Jew as the eldest-born of Time, touching the Creation and reaching forward into the future, the true blase of the Universe; the Wandering Jew who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything, led everything, thought everything and suffered everything."

"Bravo, quite a bit of Beaconsfieldian fustian," said Sidney laughing, yet astonished. "One would think you were anxious to assert yourself against the ancient peerage of this mushroom realm."

"It is the bare historical truth," said Esther, quietly. "We are so ignorant of our own history—can we wonder at the world's ignorance of it? Think of the part the Jew has played—Moses giving the world its morality, Jesus its religion, Isaiah its millennial visions, Spinoza its cosmic philosophy, Ricardo its political economy, Karl Marx and Lassalle its socialism, Heine its loveliest poetry, Mendelssohn its most restful music, Rachael its supreme acting—and then think of the stock Jew of the American comic papers! There lies the real comedy, too deep for laughter."

"Yes, but most of the Jews you mention were outcasts or apostates," retorted Sidney. "There lies the real tragedy, too deep for tears. Ah, Heine summed it up best: 'Judaism is not a religion; it is a misfortune.' But do you wonder at the intolerance of every nation towards its Jews? It is a form of homage. Tolerate them and they spell 'Success,' and patriotism is an ineradicable prejudice. Since when have you developed this extraordinary enthusiasm for Jewish history? I always thought you were an anti-Semite."

Esther blushed and meditatively sniffed at her bouquet, but fortunately the rise of the curtain relieved her of the necessity far a reply. It was only a temporary relief, however, for the quizzical young artist returned to the subject immediately the act was over.

"I know you're in charge of the aesthetic department of the Flag," he said. "I had no idea you wrote the leaders."

"Don't be absurd!" murmured Esther.

"I always told Addie Raphael could never write so eloquently; didn't I, Addie? Ah, I see you're blushing to find it fame, Miss Ansell."

Esther laughed, though a bit annoyed. "How can you suspect me of writing orthodox leaders?" she asked.

"Well, who else is there?" urged Sidney, with mock naivete. "I went down there once and saw the shanty. The editorial sanctum was crowded. Poor Raphael was surrounded by the queerest looking set of creatures I ever clapped eyes on. There was a quaint lunatic in a check suit, describing his apocalyptic visions; a dragoman with sore eyes and a grievance against the Board of Guardians; a venerable son of Jerusalem with a most artistic white beard, who had covered the editorial table with carved nick-nacks in olive and sandal-wood; an inventor who had squared the circle and the problem of perpetual motion, but could not support himself; a Roumanian exile with a scheme for fertilizing Palestine; and a wild-eyed hatchet-faced Hebrew poet who told me I was a famous patron of learning, and sent me his book soon after with a Hebrew inscription which I couldn't read, and a request for a cheque which I didn't write. I thought I just capped the company of oddities, when in came a sallow red-haired chap, with the extraordinary name of Karlkammer, and kicked up a deuce of a shine with Raphael for altering his letter. Raphael mildly hinted that the letter was written in such unintelligible English that he had to grapple with it for an hour before he could reduce it to the coherence demanded of print. But it was no use; it seems Raphael had made him say something heterodox he didn't mean, and he insisted on being allowed to reply to his own letter! He had brought the counter-blast with him; six sheets of foolscap with all the t's uncrossed, and insisted on signing it with his own name. I said, 'Why not? Set a Karlkammer to answer to a Karlkammer.' But Raphael said it would make the paper a laughing-stock, and between the dread of that and the consciousness of having done the man a wrong, he was quite unhappy. He treats all his visitors with angelic consideration, when in another newspaper office the very office-boy would snub them. Of course, nobody has a bit of consideration for him or his time or his purse."

"Poor Raphael!" murmured Esther, smiling sadly at the grotesque images conjured up by Sidney's description.

"I go down there now whenever I want models," concluded Sidney gravely.

"Well, it is only right to hear what those poor people have to say," Addie observed. "What is a paper for except to right wrongs?"

"Primitive person!" said Sidney. "A paper exists to make a profit."

"Raphael's doesn't," retorted Addie.

"Of course not," laughed Sidney. "It never will, so long as there's a conscientious editor at the helm. Raphael flatters nobody and reserves his praises for people with no control of the communal advertisements. Why, it quite preys upon his mind to think that he is linked to an advertisement canvasser with a gorgeous imagination, who goes about representing to the unwary Christian that the Flag has a circulation of fifteen hundred."

"Dear me!" said Addie, a smile of humor lighting up her beautiful features.

"Yes," said Sidney, "I think he salves his conscience by an extra hour's slumming in the evening. Most religious folks do their moral book-keeping by double entry. Probably that's why he's not here to-night."

"It's too bad!" said Addie, her face growing grave again. "He comes home so late and so tired that he always falls asleep over his books."

"I don't wonder," laughed Sidney. "Look what he reads! Once I found him nodding peacefully over Thomas a Kempis."

"Oh, he often reads that," said Addie. "When we wake him up and tell him to go to bed, he says he wasn't sleeping, but thinking, turns over a page and falls asleep again."

They all laughed.

"Oh, he's a famous sleeper," Addie continued. "It's as difficult to get him out of bed as into it. He says himself he's an awful lounger and used to idle away whole days before he invented time-tables. Now, he has every hour cut and dried—he says his salvation lies in regular hours."

"Addie, Addie, don't tell tales out of school," said Sidney.

"Why, what tales?" asked Addie, astonished. "Isn't it rather to his credit that he has conquered his bad habits?"

"Undoubtedly; but it dissipates the poetry in which I am sure Miss Ansell was enshrouding him. It shears a man of his heroic proportions, to hear he has to be dragged out of bed. These things should be kept in the family."

Esther stared hard at the house. Her cheeks glowed as if the limelight man had turned his red rays on them. Sidney chuckled mentally over his insight. Addie smiled.

"Oh, nonsense. I'm sure Esther doesn't think less of him because he keeps a time-table."

"You forget your friend has what you haven't—artistic instinct. It's ugly. A man should be a man, not a railway system. If I were you, Addie, I'd capture that time-table, erase lecturing and substitute 'cricketing.' Raphael would never know, and every afternoon, say at 2 P.M., he'd consult his time-table, and seeing he had to cricket, he'd take up his stumps and walk to Regent's Park."

"Yes, but he can't play cricket," said Esther, laughing and glad of the opportunity.

"Oh, can't he?" Sidney whistled. "Don't insult him by telling him that. Why, he was in the Harrow eleven and scored his century in the match with Eton; those long arms of his send the ball flying as if it were a drawing-room ornament."

"Oh yes," affirmed Addie. "Even now, cricket is his one temptation."

Esther was silent. Her Raphael seemed toppling to pieces. The silence seemed to communicate itself to her companions. Addie broke it by sending Sidney to smoke a cigarette in the lobby. "Or else I shall feel quite too selfish," she said. "I know you're just dying to talk to some sensible people. Oh, I beg your pardon, Esther."

The squire of dames smiled but hesitated.

"Yes, do go," said Esther. "There's six or seven minutes more interval. This is the longest wait."

"Ladies' will is my law," said Sidney, gallantly, and, taking a cigarette case from his cloak, which was hung on a peg at the back of a box, he strolled out. "Perhaps," he said, "I shall skip some Shakspeare if I meet a congenial intellectual soul to gossip with."

He had scarce been gone two minutes when there came a gentle tapping at the door and, the visitor being invited to come in, the girls were astonished to behold the young gentleman with the dyed carnation and the crimson silk handkerchief. He looked at Esther with an affable smile.

"Don't you remember me?" he said. The ring of his voice woke some far-off echo in her brain. But no recollection came to her.

"I remembered you almost at once," he went on, in a half-reproachful tone, "though I didn't care about coming up while you had another fellow in the box. Look at me carefully, Esther."

The sound of her name on the stranger's lips set all the chords of memory vibrating—she looked again at the dark oval face with the aquiline nose, the glittering eyes, the neat black moustache, the close-shaved cheeks and chin, and in a flash the past resurged and she murmured almost incredulously, "Levi!"

The young man got rather red. "Ye-e-s!" he stammered. "Allow me to present you my card." He took it out of a little ivory case and handed it to her. It read, "Mr. Leonard James."

An amused smile flitted over Esther's face, passing into one of welcome. She was not at all displeased to see him.

"Addie," she said. "This is Mr. Leonard James, a friend I used to know in my girlhood."

"Yes, we were boys together, as the song says," said Leonard James, smiling facetiously.

Addie inclined her head in the stately fashion which accorded so well with her beauty and resumed her investigation of the stalls. Presently she became absorbed in a tender reverie induced by the passionate waltz music and she forgot all about Esther's strange visitor, whose words fell as insensibly on her ears as the ticking of a familiar clock. But to Esther, Leonard James's conversation was full of interest. The two ugly ducklings of the back-pond had become to all appearance swans of the ornamental water, and it was natural that they should gabble of auld lang syne and the devious routes by which they had come together again.

"You see, I'm like you, Esther," explained the young man. "I'm not fitted for the narrow life that suits my father and mother and my sister. They've got no ideas beyond the house, and religion, and all that sort of thing. What do you think my father wanted me to be? A minister! Think of it! Ha! ha! ha! Me a minister! I actually did go for a couple of terms to Jews' College. Oh, yes, you remember! Why, I was there when you were a school-teacher and got taken up by the swells. But our stroke of fortune came soon after yours. Did you never hear of it? My, you must have dropped all your old acquaintances if no one ever told you that! Why, father came in for a couple of thousand pounds! I thought I'd make you stare. Guess who from?"