The fact that he was a Jew had proved no bar to his popularity; he had gained many desirable friends and had, to some extent, shaken off the provincialism inevitable to one born and bred in the Jewish community.
At the bar, to which in due course he was called, his usual good fortune did not desert him.
Before he was twenty-five he had begun to be spoken of as “rising”; and at twenty-six, by unsuccessfully contesting a hard-fought election, had attracted to himself attention of another sort. He had no objection, he said, to the woolsack; but a career of political distinction was growing slowly but surely to be his leading aim in life.
“He will never starve,” said his mother, shrugging her shoulders with a comfortable consciousness of safe investments; “and he must marry money. But Reuben can be trusted to do nothing rash.” In the midst of so much that was highly promising, his health had broken down suddenly, and he had gone off grumbling to the antipodes.
It was a case of over-work, of over-strain, of nervous break-down, said the doctors; no doubt a sea-voyage would set him right again, but he must be careful of himself in the future.
“More than half my nervous patients are recruited from the ranks of the Jews,” said the great physician whom Reuben consulted. “You pay the penalty of too high a civilization.”
“On the other hand,” Reuben answered, “we never die; so we may be said to have our compensations.”
Reuben’s father had not borne out his son’s theory; he had died many years before my story opens, greatly to his own surprise and that of a family which could boast more than one nonogenarian in a generation.
He had left his wife and children well provided for, and the house in Lancaster Gate was rich in material comfort.
In the drawing-room of this house Mrs. Sachs and her daughter were sitting on the day of Reuben’s return from his six months’ absence.