yond redemption that kingly head. But it looked at me sadly with
its sweet majesty, and I stayed my hand, almost persuaded to have
faith in it still. I began multiplying excuses for Quarriar, figuring
him as misled by his neighbours, more skilled than he in playing upon
philanthropic heart-strings; he had been told, doubtless, that two
daughters made no impression upon the flinty heart of bureaucratic
charity, that in order to soften it one must 'increase and multiply.'
He had got himself into a network of falsehood from which, though his
better nature recoiled, he had been unable to disentangle himself. But
then I remembered how even in Russia he had pursued an illegal
calling, how he had helped a friend to evade military service, and
again I took up my knife. But the face preserved its reproachful
dignity, seemed almost to turn the other cheek. Illegal calling! No;
it was the law that was illegal--the cruel, impossible law, that in
taking away all means of livelihood had contorted the Jew's
conscience. It was the country that was illegal--the cruel country
whose frontiers could only be crossed by bribery and deceit--the
country that had made him cunning like all weak creatures in the
struggle for survival. And so, gradually softer thoughts came to me,
and less unmingled feelings. I could not doubt the general accuracy of
his melancholy wanderings between Russia and Rotterdam, between London
and Brighton. And were he spotless as the dove, that only made surer
the blackness of Kazelia and the partner--his brethren in Israel and
in the Exile.

* * * * *

And so the new Man of Sorrows shaped himself to my vision. And, taking
my brush, I added a touch here and a touch there till there came into
that face of sorrows a look of craft and guile. And as I stood back
from my work, I was startled to see how nearly I had come to a
photographic representation of my model; for those lines of guile had
indeed been there, though I had eliminated them in my confident
misrepresentation. Now that I had exaggerated them, I had idealized,
so to speak, in the reverse direction. And the more I pondered upon
this new face, the more I saw that this return to a truer homeliness
and a more real realism did but enable me to achieve a subtler beauty.
For surely here at last was the true tragedy of the people of
Christ--to have persisted sublimely, and to be as sordidly perverted;
to be king and knave in one; to sur