"Take me out to dinner," she suggested, "to-morrow night. Coady's having a stag party."

For she too had come to the conclusion that it was high time to make him see how she meant to handle this. He puzzled all afternoon over where he should take her. He had no right to make her conspicuous. There weren't so many places where he felt sure that they would be unobserved. Finally he decided on an obscure restaurant, but when he mentioned it to Marcella she looked astonished.

"Where's it going to end?" "Happy ending," she assured him and the waiter arrived just then with oysters.

She could not play him like that indefinitely. His plan was too near the surface. It came out in jerks.

"We can't go on like this."
"How do you want us to go on?”
"Together," he said simply.

"You mean-all the time-the whole twenty-four hours of the seven days?"

"Yes. I know what it means. But I somehow feel that there is justification if people care as we do. It doesn't do away with the wrong but I think in a kind of way it excuses it. Or makes it inevitable."

He was solemn as if he sat in judgment of them both, sober in conviction, sure of their sin. And yet he was worshiping and pitying her because he was cruel enough to love

"Care about what?"

"Us. That's what I want to talk about. I want to tell you first that I only blame myself."

"What wrong?" asked Marcella. "You mustn't be so heavy, Tom. There's nothing wrong in liking some people better than others."

"I don't like you. I love you, Mar

cella. And you're married and so am I."

Marcella's face did not change. If her mind-or was it heart-tumbled and tossed, she gave no sign of it. She did not want it to be so excited. It was too naïve.

"Well," she said at length, when she was quite sure of herself. "What if we are? Being married is the result of an early emotional incident. You mustn't take it so seriously."

"But how can I help it? What's there for us? I've got to drag you— "You can't drag me at all, Tom. If you love me, that's pleasant. But there's no dragging to be done. If you care, do it discreetly. That's the way other people do. There's no use in advertising your preferences, is there?"

"You don't understand, Marcella. I can't get along without you. I can't."

She hesitated, then gave a final wrench at the scruple in her mind.

"That might not be necessary," she said.

They were silent. The little lamp glowed, the waiter came fussily up to pour water, the orchestra's music swayed lightly around them.

With a kind of dull pain Marcella realized that she had accomplished nothing with that wrench except to bruise herself. The scruple hadn't come out. She had only lied. She knew that from the quick revulsion of feeling, as her imagination swept on from that unexpected shame. But

when she glanced at him at last, trying to be casual and not furtive as she did so, his face had cleared. It was astonishing. The tremulousness was gone, the fear, the uncertainty, the judgment. There was something about his expression that she didn't like, as if he had seen plenty of her kind before. It was a shabby look, an unpleasant one.

"I mean," said Marcella defensively, "that this is the twentieth century and marriage isn't being bottled and put away to age."

"Oh, I guess this has been going on in all centuries," answered Lathrop, and grinned. "It's nothing new."

When they were driving home and were well out of sight on an empty street, he stopped the car and tried to take her in his arms. Marcella struggled.

"Come now, dear," he said, "we understand each other. You know you like me."

Stripped of his morality, he was a rather coarse man. Lightness and epigrams were futile. There was only one way to convince him that she was in earnest. When she got home at last and stood in her bedroom, her hands stung where she had struck at him and her wrists ached. But that was nothing to the pain in her mind, where the scruple had been half torn away. She wasn't the kind of person he thought, a loose, common woman. How dared he put her in that class?

She wasn't-but what was she?

Y

ou Christians worry and complain about the Jew's influence in your civilization. We are, you say, an international people, a compact minority in your midst, with traditions, interests, aspirations and objectives distinct from your own. And you declare that this state of affairs is a menace to your orderly development; it confuses your impulses; it defeats your purposes; it muddles up your destiny. I do not altogether see the danger. Your world has always been ruled by minorities; and it seems to me a matter of indifference what the remote origin and professed creed of the governing clique is. The influence, on the other hand, is certainly there, and it is vastly greater and more insidious than you appear to realize.

That is what puzzles and amuses and sometimes exasperates us about your game of Jew-baiting. It sounds so portentous. You go about whispering terrifyingly of the hand of the Jew in this and that and the other thing. It makes us quake. We are conscious of the injury we did you when we imposed upon you our alien faith and traditions. Suppose, we say tremblingly, you should wake up to the fact that your religion, your education, your morals, your

social, governmental and legal systems, are fundamentally of our making! And then you specify, and talk vaguely of Jewish financiers and Jewish motion-picture promoters, and our terror dissolves in laughter. The goi, we see with relief, will never know the real blackness of our crimes.

We cannot make it out. Either you do not know or you have not the courage to charge us with those deeds for which there is at least a shadow of evidence and which an intelligent judge and jury could examine without impatience. Why bandy about unconvincing trifles when you might so easily indict us for serious and provable offenses? Why throw up to us a patent and clumsy forgery such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion when you might as well confront us with the Revelation of St. John? Why talk about Marx and Trotski when you have Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus to confound us with?

You call us subverters, agitators, revolution-mongers. It is the truth, and I cower at your discovery. It could be shown with only the slightest straining and juggling of the facts that we have been at the bottom of all the major revolutions in your history. We undoubtedly had a

sizable finger in the Lutheran Rebellion, and it is simply a fact that we were the prime movers in the bourgeois democratic revolutions of the century before the last, both in France and America. If we were not, we did not know our own interests. But do you point your accusing finger at us and charge us with these heinous and recorded crimes? Not at all! You fantastically lay at our door the recent great War and the upheaval in Russia, which have done not only the most injury to the Jews themselves but which a school-boy could have foreseen would have that result.

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But even these plots and revolutions are as nothing compared with the great conspiracy which we engineered at the beginning of this era and which was destined to make the creed of a Jewish sect the religion of the Western world. The Reformation was not designed in malice purely. It squared us with an ancient enemy and restored our Bible to its place of honor in Christendom. The Republican revolutions of the eighteenth century freed us of our agelong political and social disabilities. They benefited us, but they did you no harm. On the contrary, they prospered and expanded you. You owe your preeminence in the world to them. But the upheaval which brought Christianity into Europe was -or at least may easily be shown to have been-planned and executed by Jews as an act of revenge against a great Gentile state. And when you talk about Jewish conspiracies I cannot for the world understand why you do not mention the destruction of Rome and the whole civilization of anti

quity concentrated under her banners, at the hands of Jewish Christianity.

It is unbelievable, but you Christians do not seem to know where your religion came from, nor how, nor why. Your historians, with one great exception, do not tell you. The documents in the case, which are part of your Bible, you chant over but do not read. We have done our work too thoroughly; you believe our propaganda too implicitly. The coming of Christianity is to you not an ordinary historical event growing out of other events of the time; it is the fulfilment of a divine Jewish prophecy-with suitable amendments of your own. It did not, as you see it, destroy a great Gentile civilization and a great Gentile empire with which Jewry was at war; it did not plunge mankind into barbarism and darkness for a thousand years; it came to bring salvation to the Gentile world!

Yet here, if ever, was a great subversive movement, hatched in Palestine, spread by Jewish agitators, financed by Jewish money, taught in Jewish pamphlets and broadsides, at a time when Jewry and Rome were in a death-struggle, and ending in the collapse of the great Gentile empire. You do not even see it, though an intelligent child, unbefuddled by theological magic, could tell you what it is all about after a hasty reading of the simple record. And then you go on prattling of Jewish conspiracies and cite as instances the Great War and the Russian Revolution! Can you wonder that we Jews have always taken your anti-Semites rather lightly, as long as they did not resort to violence?

And, mind you, no less an author

ity than Gibbon long ago tried to enlighten you. It is now a century and a half since "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" let the cat out of the bag. Gibbon, not being a parson dabbling in history, did not try to account for the end of a great era by inventing fatuous nonsense about the vice and degradation of Rome, about the decay of morals and faith in an empire which was at that very time in the midst of its most glorious creative period. How could he? He was living in the Augustan Age in London which-in spite of nearly two thousand years since the coming of Christian salvation-was as good a replica of Augustan Rome in the matter of refined lewdness as the foggy islanders could make it. No, Gibbon was a race-conscious Gentile and an admirer of the culture of the pagan West, as well as a historian with brains and eyes. Therefore he had no difficulty laying his finger on the malady that had rotted and wasted away the noble edifice of antique civilization. He put Christianity down-the law which went forth from Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem-as the central cause of the decline and fall of Rome and all she represented.

So far so good. But Gibbon did not go far enough. He was born and died, you see, a century before the invention of scientific anti-Semitism. He left wholly out of account the element of deliberation. He saw an alien creed sweeping out of the East and overwhelming the fair lands of the West. It never occurred to him that it was precisely to this destructive end that the whole scheme of salvation was dedicated. Yet the facts are as plain as you please.

Let me in very brief recount the tale, unembroidered by miracle, prophecy or magic.

For a good perspective, I shall have to go back a space. The action conveniently falls into four parts, rising to a climax in the third. The time, when the first curtain rises, is roughly 65 B.C. Dramatis personæ are, minor parts aside, Judea and Rome. Judea is a tiny kingdom off the Eastern Mediterranean. For five centuries it has been hardly more than a geographical expression. Again and again it has been overrun and destroyed and its population carried into exile or slavery by its powerful neighbors. Nominally independent, it is now as unstable as ever and on the edge of civil war. The empire of the West, with her nucleus in the City Republic of Rome, while not yet mistress of the world, is speedily heading that way. She is acknowledged the one great military power of the time as well as the heir of Greece and the center of civilization.

Up to the present the two states have had little or no contact with one another. Then without solicitation on her part Rome was suddenly asked to take a hand in Judean affairs. A dispute had arisen between two brothers over the succession to the petty throne, and the Roman general Pompey, who happened to be in Damascus winding up bigger matters, was called upon to arbitrate between the claimants. With the simple directness of a republican soldier, Pompey exiled one of the brothers, tossed the chief priesthood to his rival, and abolished the kingly dignity altogether. Not to put too fine a point on it, Pom