He found some consolation in going to the synagogue. His mother was delighted, but the religion was no comfort to him. What pleased him was to see the old Jews in their shawls and the women in their beaded gowns, praying each in their separate parts of the building--praying until they wept, and abasing themselves before the Lord. What woe, what misery they expressed! All the year round was this dismal wailing, and there was only happiness on the day that Haman was hanged. . . . It seemed good and decent to him that the sexes should be separate before the Lord, as they should be separate before the holy spirit that was in them. They should meet in holiness, hover for a moment above life, then sink back into it again to gather new strength. So love would be in its place. It could be gathered up and distilled. It would not be allowed to spread like a flood of muddy water over life, which had other passions, other delights, other glorious flowerings. It had been a great day for him when, in a little shop near his home, he had come on a pair of wooden figures rudely carved by savages--African, the shopman said they were. Rudely carved, they were not at all realistic, but admirably simplified, the man and the woman sitting side by side, naked. The man was wearing a little round bowler hat, while the woman was uncovered. They had the spirit and the idea that he most loved--the idea of man and woman sitting side by side, bound in love, unfathomably deep and unimaginably high, until one should follow the other to the grave. He showed them to Golda, and told her they were she and his father. "What next will you be up to?" she said. "Why, they are blackamoors." "They are you and my father," he said, caressing the figures lovingly. "I wish you would put the thought of that girl out of your head," she said tenderly. "It is making you so ill and so thin, and I dare not think what your father will say when he knows you are drinking again." "Mother," he said, "when did you begin to love me?" "When you were born," she said. "Yes, yes. I know, as a cow loves its calf. But I mean _love_, for you do not love the others the same as me." "You were not so very old when it came to me that you were different." "But it is more now that I am a man?" "Of course." That settled his mind on the point that had been bothering him. Everywhere among the Christians love--the love that he knew and honoured--seemed to be lost in a soft, spongy worship of the mother's love for her child. The woman seemed to be wiped out of account altogether except as a mother. It seemed that she was not expected to love, and she was left by herself with the child, with the man looking rather foolish all by himself, seeing his strong, beautiful masculine love absorbed and given to the senseless little lump of flesh in the woman's arms. It was like discarding the flower for the seed, like denying the wonder of spring for the autumn fruit.