"Ah, he pays well, that boy-fool, Raphael Leon," said Pinchas, emitting a lazy ring of smoke.
"What do you mean?" cried Gabriel, flushing angrily. "Do you mean, perhaps, that you have been getting money out of him?"
"Precisely. That is what I do mean," said the poet naively. "What else?"
"Well, don't let me hear you call him a fool. He is one to send you money, but then it is for others to call him so. That boy will be a great man in Israel. The son of rich English Jews—a Harrow-boy, yet he already writes Hebrew almost grammatically."
Pinchas was aware of this fact: had he not written to the lad (in response to a crude Hebrew eulogium and a crisp Bank of England note): "I and thou are the only two people in England who write the Holy Tongue grammatically."
He replied now: "It is true; soon he will vie with me and you."
The old scholar took snuff impatiently. The humors of Pinchas were beginning to pall upon him.
"Good-bye," he said again.
"No, wait, yet a little," said Pinchas, buttonholing him resolutely. "I want to show you my acrostic on Simon Wolf; ah! I will shoot him, the miserable labor-leader, the wretch who embezzles the money of the Socialist fools who trust him. Aha! it will sting like Juvenal, that acrostic."
"I haven't time," said the gentle savant, beginning to lose his temper.