A few days later the doctor heard another bit of news: Joseph Kalmanovitch, Mikhail’s schoolmate, had also turned Christian. It was an open secret that Joseph was in love with Jenya. The town considered them already engaged. The doctor waited till the young man came to his house to see how his daughter would treat him. In a few days the doctor found the young man in his house, and Jenya went out with him as if nothing had happened. Joseph had been treated as usual. The doctor began to wonder and it occurred to him that after all, it was only he who was so reactionary and superstitious that apostasy made too deep an impression on him. Yet the doctor could not understand how his daughter could receive the young man after Mikhail’s apostasy, and how Anna Isakovna bore the thing so patiently. He promised himself to talk to his daughter. She told him clearly that she did not care whether her husband was a Jew or a Christian. She loved the man. If her father objected to a marriage between them, she would live with Joseph anyway. It was only then that his situation grew clear in the doctor’s eyes. His children were leaving his house and his religion, and he himself would remain in his old age lost among strange beliefs and perhaps be supported by his children, and bring up strange grandchildren. And maybe his children would baptize him before death so that he should lie in the graveyard together with them. This woke the doctor from his apathetic condition, and he resolved to take action. At the same time the doctor persuaded himself that he had become religious, and he would seek out small groups that congregated to pray at certain places and visit them between evening prayers. But he could not deceive himself. The prayers of the common, every-day Jews who ran into the small synagogue to free themselves for an hour from a day’s work, and to give God His due, desirous of getting through with their duties as soon as they could, made no impression on him at all. He did not understand the prayers. He did not understand the grimaces they made, and their continued whining and shaking struck him as being wild. Yet he did not lose hope, and was inwardly sure that somewhere there did exist a great, strong Judaism, a Judaism that repaid the burdens borne for its sake, a Judaism that gave Jews strength to bear suffering and still remain Jews--and it was his to seek out that Judaism which would repay him for the happiness lost in his children.