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‘He’s so orthodox,’ she murmured, as they sat in a rose-garlanded niche at a great Jewish Charity Ball, lapped around by waltz-music and the sweetness of love confessed.

‘Well, I’m not so wicked as I was,’ he smiled.

‘But you smoke on the Sabbath, Leo–you told me.’

‘And you told me your brother Julius does the same.’

‘Yes, but father doesn’t know. If Julius wants to smoke on Friday evening, he always goes to his own room.’

‘And I shan’t smoke in your father’s.’

‘No–but you’ll tell him. You’re so outspoken.’

‘Well, I won’t tell him–unless he asks me.’

She looked sad. ‘He won’t ask you–he’ll never get as far.’

He smiled confidently. ‘You’re not very encouraging, dear; what’s the matter with me?’

‘Everything. You’re an artist, with all sorts of queer notions. And you’re not so’–she blushed and hesitated–‘not so rich—-‘

He pressed her fingers. ‘Yes, I am; I’m the richest man here.’

A little delighted laugh broke from her lips, though they went on: ‘But you told me your profits are small–marble is so dear.’

‘So is celibacy. I shall economize dreadfully by marrying.’

She pouted; his flippancy seemed inadequate to the situation, and he seemed scarcely to realize that she was an heiress. But he continued to laugh away her fears. She was so beautiful and he was so strong–what could stand between them? Certainly not the Palestinian patriarch with whose inmost psychology he had, fortunately, become in such cordial sympathy.

But Mabel’s pessimism was not to be banished even by the supper champagne. They had secured a little table for two, and were recklessly absorbed in themselves.

‘At the worst, we can elope to Palestine,’ he said at last, gaily serious.

Mabel shuddered. ‘Live entirely among Jews!’ she cried.

The radiance died suddenly out of his face; it was as if she had thrust the knife she was wielding through his heart. Her silent reception of his nationalist rhapsodies he had always taken for agreement.

Nor might Mabel have undeceived him had his ideas remained Platonic. Their irruption into the world of practical politics, into her own life, was, however, another pair of shoes. Since Barstein had brought Zionism to her consciousness, she had noted that distinguished Christians were quite sympathetic, but this was the one subject on which Christian opinion failed to impress Mabel. ‘Zionism’s all very well for Christians–they’re in no danger of having to go to Palestine,’ she had reflected shrewdly.

‘And why couldn’t you live entirely among Jews?’ Barstein asked slowly.

Mabel drew a great breath, as if throwing off a suffocating weight. ‘One couldn’t breathe,’ she explained.

‘Aren’t you living among Jews now?’

‘Don’t look so glum, silly. You don’t want Jews as background as well as foreground. A great Ghetto!’ And again she shuddered instinctively.

‘Every other people is background as well as foreground. And you don’t call France a Ghetto or Italy a Ghetto?’ There was anti-Semitism, he felt–unconscious anti-Semitism–behind Mabel’s instinctive repugnance to an aggregation of Jews. And he knew that her instinct would be shared by every Jew in that festive aggregation around him. His heart sank. Never–even in those East End back-rooms where the pitiful disproportion of his consumptive-looking collaborators to their great task was sometimes borne in dismally upon him–had he felt so black a despair as in this brilliant supper-room, surrounded by all that was strong and strenuous in the race–lawyers and soldiers, and men of affairs, whose united forces and finances could achieve almost anything they set their heart upon.

‘Jews can’t live off one another,’ Mabel explained with an air of philosophy.

Barstein did not reply. He was asking himself with an artist’s analytical curiosity whence came this suicidal anti-Semitism. Was it the self-contempt natural to a race that had not the strength to build and fend for itself? No, alas! it did not even spring from so comparatively noble a source. It was merely a part of their general imitation of their neighbours–Jews, reflecting everything, had reflected even the dislike for the Jew; only since the individual could not dislike himself, he applied the dislike to the race. And this unconscious assumption of the prevailing point of view was quickened by the fact that the Jewish firstcomers were always aware of an existence on sufferance, with their slowly-won privileges jeopardized if too many other Jews came in their wake. He consulted his own pre-Zionist psychology. ‘Yes,’ he decided. ‘Every Jew who moves into our country, our city, our watering-place, our street even, seems to us an invader or an interloper. He draws attention to us, he accentuates our difference from the normal, he increases the chance of the renewal of Rishus (malice). And so we become anti-Semites ourselves. But by what a comical confusion of logic is it that we carry over the objection to Jewish aggregation even to an aggregation in Palestine, in our own land! Or is it only too logical? Is it that the rise of a Jewish autonomous power would be a standing reminder to our fellow-citizens that we others are not so radically British or German or French or American as we have vaunted ourselves? Are we afraid of being packed off to Palestine and is the fulfilment of the dream of eighteen centuries our deadliest dread?’