was well to the fore at “the Club,” and entertainments were frequent.  The middle classes of the community, overflowing with artistic instinct, supplied a phenomenal number of reciters, vocalists and instrumentalists ready to oblige, and the greatest favorites of the London footlights were pleased to come down, partly because they found such keenly appreciative audiences, and partly because they were so much mixed up with the race, both professionally and socially.  There were serious lectures now and again, but few of the members took them seriously; they came to the Club not to improve their minds but to relax them.  The Club was a blessing without disguise to the daughters of Judah, and certainly kept their brothers from harm.  The ball-room, with its decorations of evergreens and winter blossoms, was a gay sight.  Most of the dancers were in evening dress, and it would have been impossible to tell the ball from a Belgravian gathering, except by the preponderance of youth and beauty.  Where could you match such a bevy of brunettes, where find such blondes?  They were anything but lymphatic, these oriental blondes, if their eyes did not sparkle so intoxicatingly as those of the darker majority.  The young men had carefully curled moustaches and ringlets oiled like the Assyrian bull, and figure-six noses, and studs glittering on their creamy shirt-fronts.  How they did it on their wages was one of the many miracles of Jewish history.  For socially and even in most cases financially they were only on the level of the Christian artisan.  These young men in dress-coats were epitomes of one aspect of Jewish history.  Not in every respect improvements on the “Sons of the Covenant,” though; replacing the primitive manners and the piety of the foreign Jew by a veneer of cheap culture and a laxity of ceremonial observance.  It was a merry party, almost like a family gathering, not merely because most of the dancers knew one another, but because “all Israel are brothers”—­and sisters.  They danced very buoyantly, not boisterously; the square dances symmetrically executed, every performer knowing his part; the waltzing full of rhythmic grace.  When the music was popular they accompanied it on their voices.  After supper their heels grew lighter, and the laughter and gossip louder, but never beyond the bounds of decorum.  A few Dutch dancers tried to introduce the more gymnastic methods in vogue in their own clubs, where the kangaroo is dancing master, but the sentiment of the floor was against them.  Hannah danced little, a voluntary wallflower, for she looked radiant in tussore silk, and there was an air of refinement about the slight, pretty girl that attracted the beaux of the Club.  But she only gave a duty dance to Sam, and a waltz to Daniel Hyams, who had been brought by his sister, though he did not boast a swallow-tail to match her flowing draperies.  Hannah caught a rather unamiable glance from pretty Bessie Sugarman, whom poor Daniel was trying hard not to see in the crush.