and being accommodated with an orange-box.  Little rectification of such distorted views of life was to be expected from Moses Ansell, who went down to his grave without seeing even a circus, and had no interest in art apart from the “Police News” and his “Mizrach” and the synagogue decorations.  Even when Esther’s sceptical instinct drove her to inquire of her father how people knew that Moses got the Law on Mount Sinai, he could only repeat in horror that the Books of Moses said so, and could never be brought to see that his arguments travelled on roundabouts.  She sometimes regretted that her brilliant brother Benjamin had been swallowed up by the orphan asylum, for she imagined she could have discussed many a knotty point with him.  Solomon was both flippant and incompetent.  But in spite of her theoretical latitudinarianism, in practice she was pious to the point of fanaticism and could scarce conceive the depths of degradation of which she heard vague horror-struck talk.  There were Jews about—­grown-up men and women, not insane—­who struck lucifer matches on the Sabbath and housewives who carelessly mixed their butter-plates with their meat-plates even when they did not actually eat butter with meat.  Esther promised herself that, please God, she would never do anything so wicked when she grew up.  She at least would never fail to light the Sabbath candles nor to kasher the meat.  Never was child more alive to the beauty of duty, more open to the appeal of virtue, self-control, abnegation.  She fasted till two o’clock on the Great White Fast when she was seven years old and accomplished the perfect feat at nine.  When she read a simple little story in a prize-book, inculcating the homely moralities at which the cynic sneers, her eyes filled with tears and her breast with unselfish and dutiful determinations.  She had something of the temperament of the stoic, fortified by that spiritual pride which does not look for equal goodness in others; and though she disapproved of Solomon’s dodgings of duty, she did not sneak or preach, even gave him surreptitious crusts of bread before he had said his prayers, especially on Saturdays and Festivals when the praying took place in Shool and was liable to be prolonged till mid-day.

Esther often went to synagogue and sat in the ladies’ compartment.  The drone of the “Sons of the Covenant” downstairs was part of her consciousness of home, like the musty smell of the stairs, or Becky’s young men through whom she had to plough her way when she went for the morning milk, or the odors of Mr. Belcovitch’s rum or the whirr of his machines, or the bent, snuffy personality of the Hebrew scholar in the adjoining garret, or the dread of Dutch Debby’s dog that was ultimately transformed to friendly expectation.  Esther led a double life, just as she spoke two tongues.  The knowledge that she was a Jewish child, whose people had had a special history, was always at the back of her consciousness; sometimes it was brought to the front by the scoffing rhymes of Christian children, who informed her that they had stuck a piece of pork upon a fork and given it to a member of her race.