wo lines particularly,
that you seemed to like most of all,--

"'That sense and worth o'er a' the earth
May bear the prize and a' that;'

"and yet now, now--"

"But, my dear child," as Laura here broke down with a little sob,--"my
dear child, it isn't that these people are poor,--it is because we don't
know anything about them."

"I--I think it is because you _do_ know that--that they live on McVane
Street," faltered Laura.

"Well, that _is_ to know nothing about them, in the sense that father
means," broke in her brother, sharply. "Their living there shows that
they are the kind of people that are out of our class entirely,--people
that we don't _want_ to know. I didn't think it mattered much the other
day, when you told me you were going down there to take tea with your
teacher; but when I find you are to make friends with the young clerks
who are the relations of your teacher, I think it matters a good deal."

"But this clerk, as you call him, has a great deal better manners than
Charley Aplin. He behaves a great deal more like a gentleman."

"And he has a much longer nose," retorted her brother, with a sneering
little laugh. "The fellow's a Jew, I'm certain; he has a regular Jewish
face."

"He has _not_," began Laura, indignantly, and then stopped suddenly. It
was the low trader-type of Jewish face reflected from her brother's mind
that she saw as she spoke; then Mrs. Bodn's beautiful profile and that
of her nephew rose before her! If they--if they--her brother, her
father, could see these faces,--these faces so fine and intelligent, and
saw, too, the likeness that she had seen to the portrait in her uncle's
library,--would they feel differently,--would they do justice to Esther
and her relations, though they _were_ Jews,--would they admit that they
were of the higher type, that they were fit friends for her? No, no, no,
she answered herself, as soon as these questions started up in her mind,
and, stung through all her generous young heart by these instinctive
answers, she burst forth: "You talk about Jews as if there were but one
class,--the lowest class. What if all Americans were judged by the
lowest class? Would you call that fair? And you think the Bodns are the
lowest kind just because they are poor and live on McVane Street! That
great novelist who lived in England and who was prime minister there,
Lord Beaconsfield, was a Jew, and he was proud of it; and the
Mendelssohns were Jews; and there