'Ah, that is what you religious people will never understand,' she said scathingly. 'You want everything to preach.'
'Everything does preach something,' he retorted. 'Why not have the sermon good?'
'I consider the original sermon was good,' she said defiantly. 'It doesn't need an antidote.'
'How can you say that? Surely, merely as one who was born a Jewess, you wouldn't care for the sombre picture drawn by this Armitage to stand as a portrait of your people.'
She shrugged her shoulders—the ungraceful shrug of the Ghetto.
'Why not? It is one-sided, but it is true.'
'I don't deny that; probably the man was sincerely indignant at certain aspects. I am ready to allow he did not even see he was one-sided. But if you see it, why not show the world the other side of the shield?'
She put her hand wearily to her brow.
'Do not ask me,' she said. 'To have my work appreciated merely because the moral tickled the reader's vanity would be a mockery. The suffrages of the Jewish public—I might have valued them once; now I despise them.'
She sank further back on the chair, pale and silent.