intly aromatic. It must be very wonderful, this
strange passion, luring her son from his people with its forbidden
glamour. How Highbury would be scandalized, robbed of so eligible a
bridegroom! The sons-in-law she had enriched would reproach her for
the shame imported into the family--they who had cleaved to the Faith!
And--more formidable than all the rest--she heard the tongue of her
cast-off seaport, to whose reverence or disesteem she still
instinctively referred all her triumphs and failures.

Yet, on the other hand, surged her hero-son's scorn at the union by
contract consecrated by the generations! But surely a compromise could
be found. He should have love--this strange English thing--but could
he not find a Jewess? Ah, happy inspiration! he should marry a quite
poor Jewess--he had money enough, thank Heaven! That would show him he
was not making a match, that he was truly in love.

But this strange girl at Harrow--he would never be happy with her! No,
no; there were limits to Anglicization.

XI

It was not till she was seated in the ancient synagogue, relieved from
the squeeze of entry in the wake of soldiers and the exhilaration of
hearing 'See the Conquering Hero comes' pealing, she knew not whence,
that she woke to the full strangeness of it all, and to the
consciousness that she was actually sitting among the men--just as in
St. Paul's. And what men! Everywhere the scarlet and grey of uniforms,
the glister of gold lace--the familiar decorous lines of devout
top-hats broken by glittering helmets, bear-skins, white nodding
plumes, busbies, red caps a-cock, glengarries, all the colour of the
British army, mixed with the feathered jauntiness of the Colonies and
the khaki sombreros of the C.I.V.'s! Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards,
Dragoon Guards, Lancers, Hussars, Artillery, Engineers, King's Royal
Rifles, all the corps that had for the first time come clearly into
her consciousness in her tardy absorption into English realities, Jews
seemed to be among them all. And without conscription--oh, what would
poor Solomon have thought of that?

The Great Synagogue itself struck a note of modern English gaiety, as
of an hotel dining-room, freshly gilded, divested of its historic
mellowness, the electric light replacing the ancient candles and
flooding the winter afternoon with white resplendence. The
pulpit--yes, the pulpit--was swathed in the Union Jack; and looking
towards the box of the _Parnass_ and _Gabba