David stopped suddenly, surprised at his own sentiments, which he learned for the first time. However vaguely they might have been simmering in his brain, he could not honestly accuse himself of having ever bestowed any reflection on "the higher parts of Judaism" or even on the religious convictions apart from the racial aspects of his future wife. Could it be that Hannah's earnestness was infecting him?
"Oh, then you would marry a Jewess!" said Hannah.
"Oh, of course," he said in astonishment. Then as he looked at her pretty, earnest face the amusing recollection that she was married already came over him with a sort of shock, not wholly comical. There was a minute of silence, each pursuing a separate train of thought. Then David wound up, as if there had been no break, with an elliptical, "wouldn't you?"
Hannah shrugged her shoulders and elevated her eyebrows in a gesture that lacked her usual grace.
"Not if I had only to please myself," she added.
"Oh, come! Don't say that," he said anxiously. "I don't believe mixed marriages are a success. Really, I don't. Besides, look at the scandal!"
Again she shrugged her shoulders, defiantly this time.
"I don't suppose I shall ever get married," she said. "I never could marry a man father would approve of, so that a Christian would be no worse than an educated Jew."
David did not quite grasp the sentence; he was trying to, when Sam and
Leah passed them. Sam winked in a friendly if not very refined manner.
"I see you two are getting on all right." he said.