And how disgusting the streets had become! Such a litter, such a noise, such aimless, ugly people! He could understand his mother's horror of them. Ah! she never failed him. To her his words were always music, his presence was always light. Half-dead and miserable as he was, she could know and love the aching heart of him that lived so furiously behind all the death and the misery and the ashes of young hopes that crusted him. She was like the sky and the trees. She was like the young grass springing and waving so delicately in the wind. She was like the water and the rolling hills. . . . He had discovered these things at Hampstead, whither he had gone out of sheer aimlessness. He had never been in the Tube, and one day, with a shilling borrowed from Harry, it seemed appropriate to him to plunge into the bowels of the earth. The oppression of the air, the roar of the train, the flash of the stations as he moved through them, suited his mood, fantastic and futile. He got out at Hampstead. It was his first sight of the country. He could hardly move at first for emotion. He found himself laughing, and he stooped and touched the grass tenderly, almost timidly, as though he were afraid of hurting it. He was fearful at first of walking on it, but that seemed to him childish, and he strode along with his quick, light-footed stride and lost himself in the willow groves. He made a posy of wild-flowers and took them back to his mother, carrying them unashamedly in his hand, entirely oblivious of the smiles of the passers-by. He knew he could not tell his mother of the happiness of that day, and the flowers could say more than any words. Yet the happiness only made his misery more acute. He suffered terribly from the pious narrowness of his home, the restricted, cramped life of his brothers and sisters, who seemed to him to be stealing such life as they had from the religious observances to which they were bound by their father's rigid will. Prayers at home, prayers in the synagogue: the dreadful monotony of the home, of the talk, of the squabbles: human life forced to be as dull as that of the God who no longer interfered in human life. . . . There was a tragedy in the street. There had been a scandal. A young Rabbi, a gloriously handsome creature, who sang in the synagogue, had fallen in love with a little girl of fourteen who lived opposite the Kühlers. Golda had watched the intrigue from her windows, and she said it was the girl's fault. The Rabbi used to go every day when her father was out and she used to let him in. Jacob wrote to the girl's father, and the Rabbi left his lodgings and took a room over a little restaurant round the corner. He had his dinner and went upstairs and sat up all night singing, in his lovely tenor voice, love songs and religious chants, so sweetly that the neighbours threw their windows open and there was a little crowd of people in the street listening. And in the morning they found him with his throat cut.