He was a devout Jew and despised Christians, as he despised luxury, pleasure, comfort, not actively nor with any hatred. He simply did not need them. He had lived without them, and he asked nothing of life. He was alive; that was enough. Passions seized him and he followed them. Without passion he never moved, never stirred a finger except to keep himself alive. Passion had chosen his wife for him. Golda, the beautiful, was his wife. In her he was bound more firmly to his race and his faith, and there was no need to look beyond. He was rooted. She had borne him children, but he had no more ambition for them than for himself. Leah, the beauty, should wed a rich man, not for ambitious reasons, but because, in life, beauty and riches were proper mates. There is a certain orderliness about life, and certain things can only be prevented by an irruption of passion. If that happens, then life takes its revenge and becomes hard and bleak, but it is still life, and only a fool will complain. Jacob never complained, and he took his Golda's reproaches in silence, unless she became unjust, and then he silenced her brutally and callously. She bore with him, because she prized his honesty, his steadfast simplicity, and because she knew that his passion had never wakened a profound answer in herself. She had very slowly been roused to love, which had flowered in her with the birth of her youngest child, in whom she had learned a power of acceptance almost equal to her husband's. Like him, she clung to her race and her faith and never looked beyond. In London she found that she was left alone and her life was no longer hemmed in by a menacing world of soldiers and police and peasants, who swore the Jews cheated them and spread terrifying tales of Jewish practices upon Christian children. Christian London was indifferent to the Jews, and she could be indifferent to Christian London. She had no curiosity about it and never went above a mile from her house. She made no attempt to learn English, but could not help gleaning a few words from her children as they picked it up at school. The synagogue was the centre of her life, and from it came all the life she cared to have outside her family. She was absorbed in little Mendel, by whom her world was coloured. If he was happy, that was sunshine to her. If he was oppressed and tearful, her sky was overcast. If he was ill, it seemed to her a menace of the end.