"'If they were prejudices, you would be right, but you cannot call respected traditions prejudices. It is to put our faith in danger."
"'What is faith?'
"'The definition is unintelligible to those who do not feel the need of it.'
"'It is easy to recognize, in listening to you, the teachings of your first fanatical masters.'
"'I do not dream of shaking off the teachings of childhood. They have made me a member of God's chosen people. Leave me my convictions.'
"'Keep them, if you will. Your whims will depart of themselves. All I ask is that you keep them to yourself. Actual society is tolerant, but it does not like fanaticism, for that always denotes a narrow mind or an unhealthy state. Truly none of us forgets that he is a Jew, but it is unnecessary and injurious for one to be perpetually clothed in his Judaism.'
"The life of my guardian conformed in all things to his principles. He was guided by cold reason, sometimes also by passion, which he knew well how to bridle, but never by sentiment, of which he was either destitute, or from which he strove to deliver himself. I know not if he was fashioned thus by nature or by education, but each one of his steps was regulated by self-interest. He put calculation above all things. He loved his daughter, but in his own way; he had disposed of her, as he thought, excellently, and had brought her up to conform to his ideas.
"A terrible despot under a benign form, he had a conservative instinct to undertake nothing that was not certain to succeed. Fighting against obstacles, where to draw back would have been an avowal of his weakness, he almost always succeeded where other men failed.
"He now endeavoured to widen the circle of my acquaintances. In spite of my distaste to pushing myself on in this way, he did not cease to preach to me that I must take men by storm. He often took me to visit people who were odious to him; for these he reserved his most gracious smiles, his most cordial protestations. He turned a deaf ear to all offensive allusions, and did not appear to notice the indifference of this one nor the ostensible malevolence of another. He had such control over himself that things which completely upset me did not seem to make the least impression on him. He contented himself with biting his lips and smiling. But afterward the reaction was violent, and the more his irritation had been restrained the more violent was his hatred when he had taken off the mask. Reason, which always predominated with him, was the only thing which kept him from passing the bounds prescribed by prudence.
"From the first year of my sojourn in Warsaw he initiated me into the world of speculators, where one must know how to defend one's self in order not to be crushed. Every day I felt myself less adapted to such a life. What shocked me most was the continual lying; hardly any one thought of speaking the truth. I adopted a different line of conduct,--an audacious frankness.