VERA [_Smoothing his hair_] Oh, David. And to think that I was brought up to despise your race. DAVID [_Sadly_] Yes, all Russians are. VERA But we of the nobility in particular. DAVID [_Amazed, half-releasing her_] You are noble? VERA My father is Baron Revendal, but I have long since carved out a life of my own. DAVID Then he will not separate us? VERA No. [_Re-embracing him._] Nothing can separate us. [_A knock at the street-door. They separate. The automobile is heard clattering off._] DAVID It is my uncle coming back. VERA [_In low, tense tones_] Then I shall slip out. I could not bear a third. I will write. [_She goes to the door._] DAVID Yes, yes ... Vera. [_He follows her to the door. He opens it and she slips out._] MENDEL [_Half-seen at the door, expostulating_] You, too, Miss Revendal----? [_Re-enters._] Oh, David, you have driven away all your friends. DAVID [_Going to window and looking after VERA_] Not all, uncle. Not all. [_He throws his arms boyishly round his uncle._] I am so happy. MENDEL Happy? DAVID She loves me--Vera loves me. MENDEL Vera? DAVID Miss Revendal. MENDEL Have you lost your wits? [_He throws DAVID off._] DAVID I don't wonder you're amazed. Maybe you think _I_ wasn't. It is as if an angel should stoop down---- MENDEL [_Hoarsely_] This is true? This is not some stupid _Purim_ joke? DAVID True and sacred as the sunrise. MENDEL But you are a Jew! DAVID Yes, and just think! She was bred up to despise Jews--her father was a Russian baron---- MENDEL If she was the daughter of fifty barons, you cannot marry her. DAVID [_In pained amaze_] Uncle! [_Slowly_] Then your hankering after the synagogue was serious after all. MENDEL It is not so much the synagogue--it is the call of our blood through immemorial generations. DAVID _You_ say that! You who have come to the heart of the Crucible, where the roaring fires of God are fusing our race with all the others. MENDEL [_Passionately_] Not _our_ race, not your race and mine. DAVID What immunity has our race? [_Meditatively_] The pride and the prejudice, the dreams and the sacrifices, the traditions and the superstitions, the fasts and the feasts, things noble and things sordid--they must all into the Crucible. MENDEL [_With prophetic fury_] The Jew has been tried in a thousand fires and only tempered and annealed. DAVID Fires of hate, not fires of love. That is what melts. MENDEL [_Sneeringly_] So I see. DAVID Your sneer is false. The love that melted me was not Vera's--it was the love _America_ showed me--the day she gathered me to her breast. MENDEL [_Speaking passionately and rapidly_] Many countries have gathered us. Holland took us when we were driven from Spain--but we did not become Dutchmen. Turkey took us when Germany oppressed us, but we have not become Turks.