“I speak always of these assimilated and half-assimilated English Jewesses. Certainly to me they are most inimical.” “More so than the Germans?” “In a different way. They have here less social disabilities. But they are most absolutely terre-à-terre.” “Why are Russian Jewesses different?” “Many of them are idealist. Many live altogether by one or two ideas of Tolstoy.” “Why do you smile condescendingly?” “These ideas can lead only to revolution. I am not a revolutionary. While I admire everywhere those who suffer for their ideals.” “You admit that Tolstoy has influenced Russian Jewesses. _He_ got his ideas from Christ. So you say. I did not know he was religious.” “It is a later development. But you remember Levin. But tell me, do you not consider that wife and mother is the highest position of woman?” “It is neither high nor low. It may be anything. If you define life for women, as husbands and children, it means that you have no consciousness at all where women are concerned.” “There is the evidence of women themselves. The majority find their whole life in these things.” “That is a description, from outside, by men. When women use it they do not know what they say.” CHAPTER XIII It was strange that it should be the house that had always caught her eye, as she crossed the square; one of the spots that always made the years of her London life show as a continuous communion with the rich brightness of the west-end. The houses round about it were part of the darker colour of London, creating even in sunlight the beloved familiar London atmosphere of dun-coloured mist and grime. But this house was a brilliant white, its windows fringed, during the season, with the gentle deep velvet pink of ivy-leaf geraniums and having, across the lower half of its façade, a fine close trellis of green painted wood, up which a green creeper clambered, neat and sturdy, with small bright polished leaves making a woodland blur across the diamond patterned mesh of white and green. There were other creepers in the square, but they hung in festoons, easily shabby, spoiled at their brightest by the thought of their stringy bare tendrils hung with shrivelled leaves. These small green leaves faded and dried and fell crisply, leaving a network of clean twigs to gleam in the rain, and the trellis bright green against the white house-front, suggesting summer all the year around. She went eagerly towards this permanent summer created by wealth, warmed by the imagined voice of a power that could transform all difficulties, setting them in a beauty that lived by itself.