Had Clara been a boy her father would have sooner allowed her to be burned alive than to be taught “Gentile wisdom.” But woman is out of the count in the Jewish church, so he neither interfered nor tried to understand the effect that Gentile education was having on her.
Father, mother and daughter represented three distinct worlds, Clara being as deeply engrossed in her “Gentile wisdom” as Rabbi Rachmiel was in his Talmud, or as her mother in her trunks. That the girl belonged to a society that was plotting against the Czar the old people had not the remotest idea, of course.
Besides Clara and her married sister the old couple had two sons, one of them a rabbi in a small town and the other a merchant in the same place.
Clara put out the smoky light of a crude chimneyless little lamp (with a piece of wire to work the wick up and down), which had been left burning for her. A few streaks of raw daylight crept in through the shutters, falling on a pair of big rusty shears fastened to the top of a wooden block, on a heap of sheet-iron, and on several rows of old Talmudic folios which lined the stretch of wall between Clara’s partition and one of the two windows.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE COUNTESS’ DISCOVERY.
AS Pavel mounted the majestic staircase of his mother’s residence he became aware that an abstract facial expression was all his memory retained of Mlle. Yavner’s likeness. He coveted another glance at her much as a man covets to hear again a new song that seems to be singing itself in his mind without his being able to reproduce it.
He found his mother sitting up for him, on the verge of a nervous collapse. She took him to a large, secluded room, the best in the vast house for tête-à-tête purposes. It was filled with mementoes, the trophies of her father’s diplomatic career, with his proud collection of rare and costly inkstands, and with odds and ends of ancient furniture, each with a proud history as clear-cut as the pedigree of a high-born race-horse.