'No, no! please do not be so unkind. I spoke in earnestness. I have only just been dismissed.'
'Dismissed!' she echoed incredulously. 'I thought the Flag was your own?'
He grew troubled. 'I bought it—but for another. We—he—has dispensed with my services.'
'Oh, how shameful!'
The latent sympathy of her indignation cheered him again.
'I am not sorry,' he said. 'I'm afraid I really was outgrowing its original platform.'
'What?' she asked, with a note of mockery in her voice. 'You have left off being orthodox?'
'I don't say that. It seems to me, rather, that I have come to understand I never was orthodox in the sense that the orthodox understand the word. I had never come into contact with them before. I never realised how unfair orthodox writers are to Judaism. But I do not abate one word of what I have ever said or written, except, of course, on questions of scholarship, which are always open to revision.'
'But what is to become of me—of my conversion?' she said, with mock piteousness.
'You need no conversion!' he answered passionately, abandoning without a twinge all those criteria of Judaism for which he had fought with Strelitski. 'You are a Jewess not only in blood, but in spirit. Deny it as you may, you have all the Jewish ideals—they are implied in your attack on our society.'