Accordingly, she reigned supreme in her father’s house, obeying all her caprices, bending her servants to her will, or summarily dismissing the recalcitrant, surrounding herself with all the bodily luxuries that money can buy--and eating out her young heart in loneliness. Beyond the strong Hebrew sense of parentage, Israel Hart had little sympathy with his daughter. She despised his race and loathed his profession. He felt it instinctively. Her company was an embarrassment. He could not talk of gowns and laces, of music, picture-galleries and light literature. The engrossing pursuit of money-making interested her not in the least. Outside relatives, whose foibles and disagreeablenesses form so harmonious a household bond, there were not. By the wives and daughters of his city co-religionist friends his daughter passed with a sniff of her delicate nose. She would have none of them. Israel shrugged his shoulders, and beyond insisting on her co-operating with him in the interchange of a few formal courtesies--ordeals worse than Sabbath observances under Aunt Leah’s dispensation--left her entirely to her own devices. In the house, they rarely met, except at dinner. Afterwards, if the humour seized her, she would play to him for half an hour in the drawing-room, and then he would go down to his study. Her comings and goings were of little concern to him. He would have given her a staff of lady companions, had she desired it; but as she refused to be interfered with, Israel, with many wonderings as to the strange and hidden ways of womankind, sagaciously refrained from interference. On one point, however, he stood firm: when the question of her marriage came up for discussion, his voice should have considerable weight. But Minna scoffed at the idea of marriage with such hooked noses and shiny crowns and puffed cheeks as ventured to come a-wooing, and sat instead at her window and sighed, poor child, for the prince that never could come. She lived an aimless, lonely life, wasting her young and splendid womanhood in a vicious circle of unsatisfied longings. The society of her own folk she would not. The alien society that she craved would not her. She was a social leper--the Jew money-lender’s daughter. Yet, on looking inward, she knew that the leprosy of her wealth was in her heart’s blood. She could not cleanse herself from it, bathe in the Jordan of renunciation, go forth into the world and work out her freedom. She had the Syrian repugnances of Naaman.