"No, for I am a Jew and I am not rich," said Wolffert.
"What! You!—You a—Oh, I beg your pardon! I—" she blushed deeply.
"Pray don't apologize—don't imagine that I am offended. Would you be offended if I charged you with coming from a race of poets and philosophers and scientists—of a race that had given the world its literature and its religion?"
She burst out laughing.
"No; but I was such a fool—pray forgive me." She held out her hand and Wolffert took it and pressed it firmly—and this was the beginning of their friendship.
Wolffert walked home slowly that evening, that is, across the fields to the little farmhouse where John Marvel lived. He had food for thought.
When Eleanor Leigh saw John Marvel a few days later she told him of her conversation and the speech she had made to his friend. "You know," said John, "that he is rich or could be, if he chose to go home. His father is very rich."
"He is a new Jew to me," said Eleanor Leigh; "he is quite different from the typical Jew."
"I wonder if there is a typical Jew," questioned John to himself, and this set Eleanor wondering too.
But Eleanor Leigh found other causes for wonder in Wolffert besides the salient fact of his race which she had mentioned to her cousins, and they forced upon her the consciousness that she would have to readjust her ideas of many things as she had been compelled to do in regard to the appearance and aims of this singular people. Her idea of the Israelites had always been curiously connoted with hooked noses, foreign speech of a far from refined type, and a persistent pursuit of shekels by ways generally devious and largely devoted to shops containing articles more or less discarded by other people. Here she found a cultivated gentleman with features, if not wholly classical, at least more regular and refined than those of most young men of her acquaintance; speech so cultivated as to be quite distinguished, and an air and manner so easy and gracious as to suggest to her complete knowledge of the great world. No matter what subject was discussed between them, he knew about it more than any one else, and always threw light on it which gave it a new interest for her. He had a knowledge of the Literature and Art, not only of the ancients, but of most modern nations, and he talked to her of things of which she had never so much as heard. He had not only travelled extensively in Europe, but had travelled in a way to give him an intimate knowledge not merely of the countries, but of the people and customs of the countries which no one she had ever met possessed. He had crossed in the steerage of ocean-liners more than once and had stoked across both to England and the Mediterranean.