'But if nobody has read the man's book,' Raphael Leon ventured to interrupt at last, 'is it quite fair to assume his book isn't fit to read?' The shy dark little girl he had taken down to dinner darted an appreciative glance at her neighbour. It was in accordance with Raphael's usual anxiety to give the devil his due that he should be unwilling to condemn even the writer of an anti-Semitic novel unheard. But, then, it was an open secret in the family that Raphael was mad. They did their best to hush it up, but among themselves they pitied him behind his back. Even Sidney considered his cousin Raphael pushed a dubious virtue too far, in treating people's very prejudices with the deference due to earnest, reasoned opinions. 'But we know enough of the book to know we are badly treated,' protested the hostess. 'We have always been badly treated in literature,' said Raphael. 'We are made either angels or devils. On the one hand, Lessing and George Eliot; on the other, the stock dramatist and novelist, with their low-comedy villain.' 'Oh!' said Mrs. Goldsmith doubtfully, for she could not quite think Raphael had become infected by his cousin's propensity for paradox. 'Do you think George Eliot and Lessing didn't understand the Jewish character?' 'They are the only writers who have ever understood it,' affirmed Miss Cissy Levine emphatically. A little scornful smile played for a second about the mouth of the dark little girl. 'Stop a moment,' said Sidney. 'I've been so busy doing justice to this delicious asparagus that I have allowed Raphael to imagine nobody here has read _Mordecai Josephs_. I have, and I say there is more actuality in it than in _Daniel Deronda_ and _Nathan der Weise_ put together. It is a crude production, all the same; the writer's artistic gift seems handicapped by a dead weight of moral platitudes and high falutin, and even mysticism. He not only presents his characters, but moralises over them--actually cares whether they are good or bad, and has yearnings after the indefinable. It is all very young. Instead of being satisfied that Judæa gives him characters that are interesting, he actually laments their lack of culture. Still, what he has done is good enough to make one hope his artistic instinct will shake off his moral.' 'Oh, Sidney, what are you saying?' murmured Addie. 'It's all right, little girl. You don't understand Greek.' 'It's not Greek,' put in Raphael. 'In Greek art beauty of soul and beauty of form are one. It's French you are talking, though the ignorant ateliers where you picked it up flatter themselves it's Greek.' 'It's Greek to Addie, anyhow,' laughed Sidney. 'But that's what makes the anti-Semitic chapters so unsatisfactory.' 'We all felt their unsatisfactoriness, if we could not analyse it so cleverly,' said the hostess. 'We all felt it,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels.