ad wooed and
won despite her resistance, and in the teeth of strenuous rivalry; he
was seized with a purely savage desire to wound her, to see her cry, to
make her unhappy--anything, in fact, to rouse her from this irritating
apathy.

"I suppose," he said at last, making a great effort to recover his
outward self-control, "I suppose that you object to my asking Klara
Goldstein to come to your farewell feast?"

Thus directly appealed to by her lover, Elsa gave a direct reply.

"Yes, I do," she said.

"May I ask why?"

"A girl's farewell on the eve of her wedding-day," she replied quietly,
"is intended to be a farewell to her girl friends. Klara Goldstein was
never a friend of mine."

"She belongs to this village, anyway, doesn't she?" he queried, still
trying to speak calmly. He had risen to his feet and stood with squared
shoulders, legs wide apart, and hands buried in the pockets of his
tightly-fitting trousers. An ugly, ill-tempered, masterful man, who
showed in every line of his attitude that he meant to be supreme lord in
his own household.

"Klara Goldstein belongs to this village," he reiterated with forced
suavity, "she is my friend, is she not?"

"She may be your friend, Bela," rejoined Elsa gently, "and she certainly
belongs to this village; but she is not one of us. She is a Jewess, not
a Hungarian, like we all are."

"What has her religion to do with it?" he retorted.

"It isn't her religion, Bela," persisted the girl, with obstinacy at
least as firm as his own; "you know that quite well. Though it is an
awful thing to think that they crucified our Lord."

"Well! that is a good long while ago," he sneered; "and in any case
Klara and Ignacz Goldstein had nothing to do with it."

"No, I know. Therefore I said that religion had nothing to do with it. I
can't explain it exactly, Bela, but don't we all feel alike about that?
Hungarians are Hungarians, and Jews are Jews, and there's no getting
away from that. They are different to us, somehow. I can't say how, but
they are different. They don't speak as we do, they don't think as we
do, their Sunday is Saturday, and their New Year's day is in September.
Jewesses can't dance the csardas and Jews have a contempt for our gipsy
music and our songs. They are Jews and we are Hungarians. It is
altogether different."

He shrugged his shoulders, unable apparently to gainsay this
unanswerable argument. After all, he too was a Hungarian, and proud of
that fa