_11 p.m._--Astounding discovery! Nicholas Alexandrovitch is a Jew! I don't know how it was, but suddenly something was said; we looked at each other, and then a sort of light flashed across our faces; we read the mutual secret in each other's eyes; a magnetic impulse linked our hands together in a friendly clasp, and we felt that we were brothers. And yet Nicholas is a whole world apart from me in feeling and conviction. How strange and mysterious is this latent brotherhood which binds our race together through all differences of rank, country, and even faith! For Nicholas is an agnostic of agnostics; he is even further removed from sympathy with my new-found faith than the ordinary Christian, and yet my sympathy with him is not only warmer than, but different in _kind_ from, that which I feel toward any Christian, even Caterina's brother. I have told him all. Yes, little book, him also have I told all. And he sneers at me. But there lurks more fraternity in his sneer than in a Christian's applause. We are knit below the surface like two ocean rocks, whose isolated crests rise above the waters. Nicholas laughs at there being any Judaism to survive, or anything in Judaism worth surviving. He declares that the chosen people have been chosen for the plaything of the fates, fed with illusions and windy conceit, and rewarded for their fidelity with torture and persecution. He pities them, as he would pity a dog that wanders round its master's grave, and will not eat for grief. In fact, save for this pity, he is even as I was until these new emotions rent me. He is outwardly a Christian, because he could not live comfortably otherwise, but he has nothing but contempt for the poor peasants whose fever-wrung brows he touches with a woman's hand. He looks upon them only as a superior variety of cattle, and upon the well-to-do people here as animals with all the vices of the muzhiks, and none of their virtues. For my Judaic cravings he has a good-natured mockery, and tells me I was but sickening for this influenza. He says all my symptoms are physical, not spiritual; that the loss of Caterina depressed me, that this depression drove me into solitude, and that this solitude in its turn reacted on my depression. He thinks that religion is a secretion of morbid minds, and that my Judaism will vanish again with the last traces of my influenza. And, indeed, there is much force in what he says, and much truth in his diagnosis and analysis of my condition. He advises me to take plenty of outdoor exercise, and to go back again to one of the great towns. To go back to Judaism, to ally one's self with an outcast race and a dying religion is, he thinks, an act of folly only paralleled by its inutility. The world will outgrow all these forms and prejudices in time is his confident assurance, as he puffs tranquilly at his cigarette and sips his Chartreuse. He points out, what is true enough, that I am not alone in my dissent from the religion I profess; for, as