"I can learn."
"But you will be so long. I ought to have taught you myself. And now it is too late!"
V
In order to insure perfection, and prevent stage fright, so to speak, it had been arranged that Brum should rehearse his reading of the Sedrah on Friday in the synagogue itself, at an hour when it was free from worshippers. This rehearsal, his mother thought, was now all the more necessary to screw up Brum's confidence, but the father argued that as all places were now alike to the blind boy, the prominence of a public platform and a large staring audience could no longer unnerve him.
"But he will feel them there!" Zillah protested.
"But since they are not there on the Friday—?"
"All the more reason. Since he cannot see that they are not there, he can fancy they are there. On Saturday he will be quite used to them."
But when Jossel, yielding, brought Brum to the synagogue appointment, the fusty old Beadle who was faithfully in attendance held up his hands in holy and secular horror at the blasphemy and the blindness respectively.
"A blind man may not read the Law to the congregation!" he explained.