"How so?" cried Silverdale in amazement. "You surely are not going to degrade your Club by anti-Semitism."
"Heaven forefend! But a Jewess can never be a whole Old Maid."
"I don't understand."
"Look at it mathematically a moment."
Silverdale made a grimace.
"Consider! A Jewess, orthodox like Miss Radowski, can only be an Old Maid fractionally. An Old Maid must make 'the grand refusal!'—she must refuse mankind at large. Now Miss Radowski, being cut off by her creed from marrying into any but an insignificant percentage of mankind, is proportionately less valuable as an object-lesson; she is unfitted for the functions of Old Maidenhood in their full potentiality. Already by her religion she is condemned to almost total celibacy. She cannot renounce what she never possessed. There are in the world, roughly speaking, eight million Jews among a population of a thousand millions. The force of the example, in other words, her value as an Old Maid, may therefore be represented by .008."
"I am glad you express her as a decimal rather than a vulgar fraction," said Lord Silverdale laughing. "But I must own your reckoning seems correct. As a mathematical wrangler you are terrible. So I shall not need to try Miss Radowski?"
"No; we cannot entertain her application," said Lillie peremptorily, the thunder-cloud no bigger than a man's hand gathering on her brow at the suspicion that Silverdale did not take her mathematics seriously. Considering that in keeping him at arm's length her motive were merely mathematical (though Lord Silverdale was not aware of this) she was peculiarly sensitive on the point. She changed the subject quickly by asking what poem he had brought her.
"Do not call them poems," he answered.
"It is only between ourselves. There are no critics about."