But in proportion as the happiness at her beck and call dazzled her, so she recoiled from it.  Bent on self-effacement, attuned to the peace of despair, she almost resented the solicitation to be happy; she had suffered so much that she had grown to think suffering her natural element, out of which she could not breathe; she was almost in love with misery.  And in so sad a world was there not something ignoble about happiness, a selfish aloofness from the life of humanity?  And, illogically blent with this questioning, and strengthening her recoil, was an obstinate conviction that there could never be happiness for her, a being of ignominious birth, without roots in life, futile, shadowy, out of relation to the tangible solidities of ordinary existence.  To offer her a warm fireside seemed to be to tempt her to be false to something—­she knew not what.  Perhaps it was because the warm fireside was in the circle she had quitted, and her heart was yet bitter against it, finding no palliative even in the thought of a triumphant return.  She did not belong to it; she was not of Raphael’s world.  But she felt grateful to the point of tears for his incomprehensible love for a plain, penniless, low-born girl.  Surely, it was only his chivalry.  Other men had not found her attractive.  Sidney had not; Levi only fancied himself in love.  And yet beneath all her humility was a sense of being loved for the best in her, for the hidden qualities Raphael alone had the insight to divine.  She could never think so meanly of herself or of humanity again.  He had helped and strengthened her for her lonely future; the remembrance of him would always be an inspiration, and a reminder of the nobler side of human nature.

All this contradictory medley of thought and feeling occupied but a few seconds of consciousness.  She answered him without any perceptible pause, lightly enough.

“Really, Mr. Leon, I don’t expect you to say such things.  Why should we be so conventional, you and I?  How can your life be a blank, with Judaism yet to be saved?”

“Who am I to save Judaism?  I want to save you,” he said passionately.

“What a descent!  For heaven’s sake, stick to your earlier ambition!”

“No, the two are one to me.  Somehow you seem to stand for Judaism, too.  I cannot disentwine my hopes; I have come to conceive your life as an allegory of Judaism, the offspring of a great and tragic past with the germs of a rich blossoming, yet wasting with an inward canker, I have grown to think of its future as somehow bound up with yours.  I want to see your eyes laughing, the shadows lifted from your brow; I want to see you face life courageously, not in passionate revolt nor in passionless despair, but in faith and hope and the joy that springs from them.  I want you to seek peace, not in a despairing surrender of the intellect to the faith of childhood, but in that faith intellectually justified.  And while I want to help you, and to fill your life with the sunshine it needs, I want you to help me, to inspire me when I falter, to complete my life, to make me happier than I had ever dreamed.  Be my wife, Esther.  Let me save you from yourself.”