'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 shrugge