That Simon should enter his father's business was as inevitable as that the business should prosper in spite of Simon.

His career had been settled ere his father became aware that Highbury aspired even to law and medicine, and the idea that Simon's education was finished was not lightly to be dislodged. Simon's education consisted of the knowledge conveyed in seaport schools for the sons of tradesmen, while a long course of penny dreadfuls had given him a peculiar and extensive acquaintance with the ways of the world. Carefully curtained away in a secret compartment, lay his elementary Hebrew lore. It did not enter into his conception of the perfect Englishman. Ah, how he rejoiced in this wider horizon of London, so thickly starred with music-halls, billiard-rooms, and [55]restaurants! 'We are emancipated now,' was his cry: 'we have too much intellect to keep all those old laws;' and he swallowed the forbidden oyster in a fine spiritual glow, which somehow or other would not extend to bacon. That stuck more in his throat, and so was only taken in self-defence, to avoid the suspicions of a convivial company.

As he sat at his father's side in the synagogue—a demure son of the Covenant—this young Englishman lurked beneath his praying-shawl, even as beneath his prayer-book had lurked 'The Pirates of Pechili.'

In this hidden life Mrs. S. Cohn was not an aider or abettor, except in so far as frequent gifts from her own pocket-money might be considered the equivalent of the surreptitious cake of childhood............