Nor was Adelaide above taking an interest in the affairs of her humbler relatives behind their backs. I cannot help wishing that they had known this; it would have been to them the source of so much innocent gratification. Reuben, who had his cousin Netta on the other side of him, and whose vanity was a far subtler, more complicated affair than his sister’s, was making himself agreeable with his accustomed urbanity, beneath which the delighted maiden was unable to detect a lurking irony. The humours of the Samuel Sachses, their appearance, gestures, their excruciating method of pronouncing the English language, the hundred and one tribal peculiarities which clung to them, had long served their cousins as a favourite family joke into which it would have been difficult for the most observant of outsiders to enter. They were indeed, as Reuben had said, a remarkable survival. Born and bred in the very heart of nineteenth century London, belonging to an age and a city which has seen the throwing down of so many barriers, the levelling of so many distinctions of class, of caste, of race, of opinion, they had managed to retain the tribal characteristics, to live within the tribal pale to an extent which spoke worlds for the national conservatism. They had been educated at Jewish schools, fed on Jewish food, brought up on Jewish traditions and Jewish prejudice. Their friends, with few exceptions, were of their own race, the making of acquaintance outside the tribal barrier being sternly discouraged by the authorities. Mrs. Samuel Sachs indeed had been heard more than once to observe pleasantly that she would sooner see her daughters lying dead before her than married to Christians. Netta tossed her head defiantly at these remarks, but contented herself with sowing her little crop of wild oats on the staircases of Bayswater and Maida Vale, where she “sat out” by the hour with the very indifferent specimens of Englishmen who frequented the dances in her set. Generally speaking, the race instincts of Rebecca of York are strong, and she is less apt to give her heart to Ivanhoe, the Saxon knight, than might be imagined. Bernard Sachs, a very smug-looking little boy, with inordinately thick lips and a disagreeable nasal twang, had been placed between the two young Leunigers, who regarded him with a mixture of disgust and amusement, which they were at small pains to conceal. “Did you fast all day?” he said, by way of opening the conversation. “I did. I was _bar-mitz-vah_ last month. Is either of you fellows _bar-mitz-vah_?” “I am thirteen, if that’s what you mean,” said Lionel, with his most man of-the-world air. He considered the introduction of the popular tribal phrases very bad form indeed. “I suppose you were in _shool_ all day?” went on Bernard unabashed, and much on his dignity.