For the Jewish mind the prayer is invested with extreme sanctity. The birth of a son conveys to his father and mother immediately the glad tidings of "Thank God! a _kaddish_ for our souls!" In a precisely similar manner to the purchase of a mass and for precisely similar reasons, a _kaddish_, by a childless man and woman, will be bought for money. There are, indeed, old men who shuffle about the dark spaces of a synagogue, whose main livelihood is the recital, at a stated rate, of the prayer. But, it is needless to insist, the commercial commodity is held to possess by no means the same efficacy as the consanguineous _kaddish_. Dereliction of duty in this matter is held to be a flagrant betrayal of the dead. The image is held before the culprit's eye of the body attempting to shake free from its bondage of worms and mud, and for lack of intercession before the throne of God, enchained cruelly within the narrow territory of the coffin. The state in which Philip had endured the climax of his mother's illness, her death and funeral, had involved, it has been evident, less a storm of suffering than a trance, a deadly level of hysteria. When he returned from Angel Street to Longton, he seemed to lose his faculty for quick reaction, for poignant contrition or grief. His mind reduplicated the sooty autumn which spread like a web about the city, entrapping the last evidences of summer and leaving them to hang bedraggled like sucked flies. Whether or no, for one who had at least made such pretensions of affection towards his dead mother, he ought, from the point of view of an abstract decency, to have persisted with the prayer to which she herself had attached such importance, it is not easy to decide. It is possible that had he recited the _kaddish_ in a language he understood, he would have persisted even to the end. On the other hand, it is possible that had he been faced with the task of reiterating for so long the same fixed number and sequence of words with their inelastic content of meaning, he would have defected even sooner: that, in fact, the mere unintelligibility of the prayer conferred upon it for a season the quality of the kabbalistic. But the essential fact is this, that the emotional part of him now flowed like a sluggish backwater, and in his emotion alone the ritual could have been steeped until it shone with beauty and urgency. Only his mind moved with any clarity, and his mind had long ago decided that phylacteries belonged to Babylon, that all the terror of the Day of Atonement was an immense, an almost conquering hypnotism, from which with travail he had escaped. _Kaddish_ was but an issue of the same quality as these, though more painful in its solution; for those others were related merely to the general problem presented to him by his race, whilst this was bound up so immediately with the lovely thing he had lost.