life of humanity? And,
illogically blent with this questioning, and strengthening her recoil,
was an obstinate conviction that there could never be happiness for her,
a being of ignominious birth, without roots in life, futile, shadowy,
out of relation to the tangible solidities of ordinary existence. To
offer her a warm fireside seemed to be to tempt her to be false to
something--she knew not what. Perhaps it was because the warm fireside
was in the circle she had quitted, and her heart was yet bitter against
it, finding no palliative even in the thought of a triumphant return.
She did not belong to it; she was not of Raphael's world. But she felt
grateful to the point of tears for his incomprehensible love for a
plain, penniless, low-born girl. Surely, it was only his chivalry. Other
men had not found her attractive. Sidney had not; Levi only fancied
himself in love. And yet beneath all her humility was a sense of being
loved for the best in her, for the hidden qualities Raphael alone had
the insight to divine. She could never think so meanly of herself or of
humanity again. He had helped and strengthened her for her lonely
future; the remembrance of him would always be an inspiration, and a
reminder of the nobler side of human nature.

All this contradictory medley of thought and feeling occupied but a few
seconds of consciousness. She answered him without any perceptible
pause, lightly enough.

"Really, Mr. Leon, I don't expect _you_ to say such things. Why should
we be so conventional, you and I? How can your life be a blank, with
Judaism yet to be saved?"

"Who am I to save Judaism? I want to save you," he said passionately.

"What a descent! For heaven's sake, stick to your earlier ambition!"

"No, the two are one to me. Somehow you seem to stand for Judaism, too.
I cannot disentwine my hopes; I have come to conceive your life as an
allegory of Judaism, the offspring of a great and tragic past with the
germs of a rich blossoming, yet wasting with an inward canker, I have
grown to think of its future as somehow bound up with yours. I want to
see your eyes laughing, the shadows lifted from your brow; I want to see
you face life courageously, not in passionate revolt nor in passionless
despair, but in faith and hope and the joy that springs from them. I
want you to seek peace, not in a despairing surrender of the intellect
to the faith of childhood, but in that faith intellectually justified.
And while I want t