His first absence from the morning service at the little _shool_ in Longton (his absences from the afternoon and evening services were not ostentatious and were therefore not commented on) produced a series of violent outbursts from Dorah, culminating in a threat that she would no longer allow him to pass her doors. When he informed her that he had had other struggles to determine and others still faced him, that he was too tired arguing the matter of _kaddish_ with himself for any argument with her, that, in short, he would go, as she threatened, and become an errand boy or a clerk, her anger relaxed. It was certain he was very worn out, and if he actually left the bosom of his family, his last tie with Judaism would be snapped, and--who knew? he might, God forbid, even marry a Gentile, a _goyah_! What a scandal it would be! Benjamin would lose his Jewish clientele, it would shake Reb Monash's _chayder_ to its foundations, and what would be thought of a _maggid_ whose son ... No, the matter was too terrible to think of! They must be patient, perhaps God would be kind even yet! Yet it was hard, very hard to bear! Not for all her resolutions could she stifle periodic outbursts of wrath. Philip would rise from the table with shut lips and retire to his room and his books. Poetry had begun to lose its savour for him. Poetry tinkled. He discovered a volume of the _Poems and Ballads_. It mystified and annoyed him. He was in no mood for the sheer unrelated beauty of Keats, and Tennyson seemed fit only to read on a bench among the tulip beds of Longton Park. His feet held him too heavily to the ground to allow, with Shelley, any excursion into the empyrean. As yet it was an atmosphere too rare for him to breathe again; there was too much of the graveyard damp in his lungs. The equilibristic clap-trap of "Ulalume" and "The Raven" filled him at first with indignation and then with mere mirth.