see the cock-fight: Jews from Alexandria, heretics, adventurers,
beggars, aliens! Look ye here, Dan, Rachel said, he is a proud boy and
may thank thee little for--There are others to teach him, Dan
interrupted, and continued to walk up and down the room, for he wished
to make an end of this talk with his mother. But he hadn't crossed the
room twice when he was brought to a full stop, having remembered
suddenly that it is always by such acts as he was now meditating that
fathers lose the affections of their sons. If he were to drag Joseph
away from Azariah, from whom he was learning Hebrew and Greek, Joseph
might begin to look upon him as a tyrant. His mother was a sharp-witted
woman, and very little was needed to set her thinking. She had an
irritating way of looking as it were into his mind, and if she were to
suspect him of jealousy of Azariah he would never have a moment's peace
again.

But what in the world may we understand from all this bear-dancing up
and down the room? asked Rachel. Ye must know if you are going to
withdraw the boy from his schooling.

Dan cast an angry glance at his mother and hated her; and then his heart
misgave him, for he knew that he lacked courage to take Joseph out of
his present schooling, and dared not divide his house against himself,
or do anything that might lose him his son's love and little by little
cause himself to be looked upon as a tyrant. He knew himself to be a
weak man, except in the counting-house; he knew it, and must stifle his
jealousy of Azariah, who had forgiven Joseph his truancy and was the
only one that knew of the excursion into Tiberias. But Azariah's
indulgence did not altogether please him. He began to suspect it and to
doubt if he had acted wisely in not ordering Joseph away from Azariah:
for Azariah was robbing him, robbing him of all that he valued in this
world, his son! And it seemed to him a little later in the day, as he
closed his ledger, that he had come to be disregarded in his own house;
and he thought he would have liked much better to stay away, to dine in
the counting-house, urging a press of business. The first thing he would
hear would be "Azariah." The hated name was never off the boy's lips: he
talked of nothing else but Azariah and Hebrew and Greek and the learned
Jews whom he met at Azariah's house.

Dan sat looking into the dusk asking himself if his bargain were not
that his son should learn the Greek language but not Greek literature,