'Ah, but the way he jumped on a table when only a schoolboy to protest against the master's injustice to one of his schoolfellows! How the divine fire flamed in him!'
They talked on, these clamorous sceptics, amplifying the Lassalle legend, broidering it with Messianic myths, with the same fantastic Oriental invention that had illuminated the plain Pentateuch with imaginative vignettes, and transfiguring the dry abstractions of Socialism with the same passionate personalization. He listened impatiently. He had never been caught by Socialism, even at his hungriest. He had once been an employer himself, and his point of view survived.
They talked of the woman through whom Lassalle had met his death. One of them had seen her on the American stage—a bouncing burlesque actress.
'Like Yvonne Rupert?' he ventured to interpose.
'Yvonne Rupert?' They laughed. 'Ah, if Yvonne had only had such a snap!' cried Melchitsedek Pinchas. 'To have jilted Lassalle and been died for! What an advertisement!'
'It would have been on the bill,' agreed the table.
He asked if they thought Yvonne Rupert clever.
'Off the stage! There's nothing to her on,' said Pinchas.
The table roared as if this were a good joke. 'I dare say she would play my Ophelia as well as Mrs. Goldwater,' Pinchas added zestfully.
'They say she has a Yiddish accent,' Elkan ventured again.