She pouted; his flippancy seemed inadequate to the situation, and he seemed scarcely to realize that she was an heiress. But he continued to laugh away her fears. She was so beautiful and he was so strong--what could stand between them? Certainly not the Palestinian patriarch with whose inmost psychology he had, fortunately, become in such cordial sympathy. But Mabel's pessimism was not to be banished even by the supper champagne. They had secured a little table for two, and were recklessly absorbed in themselves. 'At the worst, we can elope to Palestine,' he said at last, gaily serious. Mabel shuddered. 'Live entirely among Jews!' she cried. The radiance died suddenly out of his face; it was as if she had thrust the knife she was wielding through his heart. Her silent reception of his nationalist rhapsodies he had always taken for agreement. Nor might Mabel have undeceived him had his ideas remained Platonic. Their irruption into the world of practical politics, into her own life, was, however, another pair of shoes. Since Barstein had brought Zionism to her consciousness, she had noted that distinguished Christians were quite sympathetic, but this was the one subject on which Christian opinion failed to impress Mabel. 'Zionism's all very well for Christians--they're in no danger of having to go to Palestine,' she had reflected shrewdly. 'And why couldn't you live entirely among Jews?' Barstein asked slowly. Mabel drew a great breath, as if throwing off a suffocating weight. 'One couldn't breathe,' she explained. 'Aren't you living among Jews now?' 'Don't look so glum, silly. You don't want Jews as background as well as foreground. A great Ghetto!' And again she shuddered instinctively. 'Every other people is background as well as foreground. And you don't call France a Ghetto or Italy a Ghetto?' There was anti-Semitism, he felt--unconscious anti-Semitism--behind Mabel's instinctive repugnance to an aggregation of Jews. And he knew that her instinct would be shared by every Jew in that festive aggregation around him. His heart sank. Never--even in those East End back-rooms where the pitiful disproportion of his consumptive-looking collaborators to their great task was sometimes borne in dismally upon him--had he felt so black a despair as in this brilliant supper-room, surrounded by all that was strong and strenuous in the race--lawyers and soldiers, and men of affairs, whose united forces and finances could achieve almost anything they set their heart upon. 'Jews can't live off one another,' Mabel explained with an air of philosophy.