The horribleness of thus bidding for Bethulah flashed on me even as I spoke. To mix up a creature of mist and moonlight with substance and fat lands! Monstrous! And yet I knew that thus, and thus only, by honourable talk with her guardian, could a Zloczszol bride be won. But the Wonder Rabbi sprang to his feet so vehemently that his high-backed chair rocked as in a gale. "Dog!" he shrieked. "Blasphemer!" I summoned all my American sang-froid. "Dog," I agreed, "inasmuch as I follow your daughter like a dog, humbly, lovingly. But blasphemer? Say rather worshipper. For I worship Bethulah." "Then worship her like the others," he roared. Had I not heard him pray, I should have expected the hoary patriarch to collapse after such an outburst. "Thank you," I said. "I don't want her to fly up to heaven for me. I want her to come down to earth--from her turret." "She will not come down to any earthly spouse," he said more gently. "Quite the reverse." "Then I will make a soul-ascension," I said defiantly. "Get back to hell, spawn of Satan!" he thundered again. "Or since, strange son of the New World, you neither believe nor disbelieve, hover eternally between hell and heaven!" "Meantime I am here," I said good-humouredly, "between you and your daughter. Come, come, be sensible; you are a very old man. Where in Zloczszol will you find a superior husband for your child?" "The Lord, to whom she is consecrated, forgive you your blasphemy," he said, in a changed voice, and rang his bell, so that the next applicant came in and I had to go. It was plain the girl was kept as a sacred celibate, a sort of vestal virgin--Bethulah was the very Hebrew for virgin, it suddenly flashed upon me. But how came such practices into Judaism--Judaism, with its cheery creed, "increase and multiply?" And _Chassidism_, I had hitherto imagined, was the cheeriness of Judaism concentrated! In Yarchi's version it was even license--"the Adamite life." I raked up my memories of the Bible--remembered Jephtha's daughter. But no! there could be no question of a vow; this was some new _Chassidic_ mystery. The crown and the shroud! The shroud of renunciation, the crown of victory! And for some fantastic shadow-myth a beautiful young life was to be immolated. My respect for _Chassidism_ vanished as suddenly as it came. But I was powerless. I could only wait till the flood of pilgrims oozed back, even as the waters had done. Then perhaps Bethulah might walk again upon the moonlit mountain-peak, or in the "house of life," as the cemetery was mystically called.