“Well, _no_,” said Miriam startled into briskness by the too quickly developing accumulation of speech. “I heard that you had done so; and wondered, how it was possible, for an Englishwoman.” “You are a Christian?” “I don’t know. I was brought up in the Anglican Church.” “Much depends upon the standpoint from which one approaches the very definite and simple creed of Judaism. I myself was a Unitarian, and therefore able to take the step without making a break with my earlier convictions.” “I see,” said Miriam coldly. Fate had deceived her, holding in reserve the trick of this simple explanation. She gazed at the seated figure. The glow of her surroundings was quenched by the chill of a perpetually active _reason_.... Science, ethics, withering common-sense playing over everything in life, making a harsh bareness everywhere, seeing nothing alive but the cold processes of the human mind; having Tennyson read at services because poetry was one of the superior things produced by humanity...... She wondered whether this woman, so exactly prepared to meet a Jewish reform movement, had been helplessly born into Unitarianism, or had taken it up as she herself had nearly done. “Much of course depends upon the synagogue through which one is admitted.” Ah; she _had_ felt the impossibilities. She had compromised and was excusing her compromise. “Of course I have heard of the reform movement.” .. The silence quivered with the assertion that the reformers were as much cut off from Judaism as Unitarianism from Anglican Christianity. To enter a synagogue that made special arrangements for the recognition of women was to admit that women were dependent on recognition. The silence admitted the dilemma. Mrs. Bergstein had passed through these thoughts, suffering? Though she had found a way through, following her cold clear reason, she still suffered? “I think I should find it impossible to associate with Jewish _women_.” “_That_ is a point you must consider very carefully indeed.” The room leapt into glowing reality. They _were_ at one; Englishwomen with a common incommunicable sense. Outcasts...... Far away, within the warm magic circle of English life, sounded the careless easy slipshod voices of Englishmen, she saw their averted talking forms, aware in every line, and protective, of something that Englishwomen held in their hands. “Don’t you find” she began breathlessly, but calm even tones drove across her eagerness: “What is your fiancé’s attitude towards religion?” “He is not exactly religious and not fully in sympathy with the reform movement because he is a Zionist and thinks that the old ritual is the only link between the persecuted Jews and those who are better placed; that it would be treachery to break with it as long as any are persecuted........ Nevertheless, he is willing to renounce his Judaism.”