I strode away, but he had heated my brain with a new idea, or one that I now allowed myself to see clearly. Some man might marry her. Then why should I not be that man? Why should I not carry Bethulah back to America with me--the most precious curiosity of the Old World--a frank, virginal creature with that touch of the angel which I had dreamed of but had never met among our smart girls--up to then. And even if it were true that Ben David was a fraud, and needed the girl for his Cabalistic mystifications, even so I was rich enough to recoup him. The girl herself was no conscious accessory; of that I felt certain. When my brain cooled, suggestions of the other aspects of the question began to find entrance. What of Bethulah herself? Why should she care to marry me? Or to go to the strange, raw country? And such a union--was it not too incongruous, too fantastic, for practical life? Thus I wrestled with myself for three days, all the while watching Bethulah's turret or the roads she might come by. On the third night I saw a wild mob of men at the turret end of the house, dancing in a ring and singing, with their eyes turned upward to the light that burnt on high. Their words I could not catch at first through the tumultuous howl, but it went on and on, like their circumvolutions, over and over again, till my brain reeled. It seemed to be an appeal to Bethulah to plead their cause on the coming _Yom-Hadin_ (New-Year day of Judgment):-- "By thy soul without sin, Enter heaven within, This divine _Yom-Hadin_, Holy Maid. "Undertake thou our plea; Let the Poison God be Answered stoutly by thee, Holy Queen." When I came to write this down afterward, I discovered it was an acrostic on her name, as is customary with festival prayers. And this I have preserved in my rough translation. V Despite my new spiritual insight, I could not bring myself to sympathize with such crude earthly visionings of the heavenly judgment bar (doubtless borrowed from the book of Job, which our enlightened Western rabbis rightly teach to be allegorical). Temporary absorption into the Over-Soul seemed to me to sum up the limits of _Chassidic_ experience. Besides, Bethulah was not a being to be employed as a sort of supernatural advocate, but a sad, tender creature needing love and protection.