GOLDA was passing through a very difficult time. Rosa was hotter on the pursuit of Issy than ever. Harry had had a violent quarrel consequent on his reiterated demand for proof of the judicial destruction of Christianity in America, and at last, like his father, he went out and bought a clean collar and announced his departure for Paris. He went away and not a word had been heard from him. Lotte refused to look at any of the young men brought by the match-makers, and Leah was the only comfortable member of the family, and she made no attempt to conceal her unhappiness with Moscowitsch. She would come on Saturday evenings and go up to her mother's room and fling herself on the bed and cry her heart out, until late in the evening Moscowitsch came to fetch her, when she would go meekly and apparently happily enough. . . . And on the top of all these troubles, here was Mendel going to the devil at a gallop. Leah's trouble with Moscowitsch was that he would never let her go out without him, and he could very rarely be persuaded to go out at all. As for going away in the summer, he could see no sense in it. He gave his wife a fine house. What more did she want? She had her children to look after. What greater pleasure could she desire? His life was entirely filled with his business and his home, and he would not look beyond them. The neighbours went to the seaside? The neighbours were fools who lived for ostentation and display. They did not know when they were well off. . . . Moscowitsch had a great admiration for his father-in-law as a man who knew what life was and refused to dilute its savour with folly, and he regarded Golda as a perfect type of woman, one who left the management of life to her husband and allowed herself to be absorbed in her duties as a wife and mother. But Leah longed to go to the seaside. It became an obsession with her, and, because she could never talk of it, she thought of nothing else. She was sick with envy when she saw the neighbours going off with the children carrying buckets and spades. Secretly she bought her own children buckets and spades, though they were much too small to use them. At last, when her worries began to tell on Golda, Leah declared that what she needed was sea air, and offered to take her for a fortnight to Margate, and Golda, anxious to escape from the horror of Mendel's coming home night after night drawn and white with dissipation, and from the dread of an explosion from Jacob, consented, and asked if Issy might go, as that Rosa of his was making him quite ill. For Golda, Leah knew that Moscowitsch would do anything in the world, and so she procured his consent on condition that he was not expected to accompany them, for he hated the sea, which had made him very ill when he came to England, and he never wished to set eyes on it again.