“It is Mr. Lee-Harrison! I know it from the way he looked at supper.”
“Yes, it is Bertie.” Reuben looked straight in Judith’s eyes. “He says you exactly fulfil his idea of Queen Esther.”
“Ah,” cried Esther Kohnthal, “I have always had a theory about her. When she was kneeling at the feet of that detestable Ahasuerus, she was thinking all the time of some young Jew whom she mashed, and who mashed her, and whom she renounced for the sake of her people!”
A momentary silence fell among them, then Reuben, looking down, said slowly: “Or perhaps she preferred the splendours of the royal position even to the attractions of that youth whom you suppose her to—er—have mashed.”
He was not fond of Esther at the best of times; now he glanced at her under his eyelids with an expression of unmistakable dislike.
“I wonder,” cried Rose, throwing herself into the breach, “what Mr. Lee-Harrison thought of it all.”
“I think,” said Leo, “that he was shocked at finding us so little like the people in Daniel Deronda.”
“Did he expect,” cried Esther, “to see our boxes in the hall, ready packed and labelled Palestine?”
“I have always been touched,” said Leo, “at the immense good faith with which George Eliot carried out that elaborate misconception of hers.”
“Now Leo is going to begin,” cried Rose; “he never has a good word for his people. He is always running them down.”