“You and Judy have something that is charming and beautiful,” he said, “and I advise you to cherish it as it is, for then it will always be a delight to you. But if you go on, we shall all change our roles; I shall have to be unpleasant to you, which I have no wish to do, and you will begin to hate me, which would be a pity, and perhaps you and Judy will decide that in order to preserve your self-respect you must deceive me and Judy’s mother. That would be painful to us, and I assure you it would also be dangerous to you.”

Then he did an extraordinary thing. He quoted Burns to me! Nobody had ever done that except my Cruikshank grandfather, down by the crick in Deptford, and I had always assumed that Burns was a sort of crick person’s poet. But here was this Viennese Jew, saying,

“The sacred lowe of weel-placed love,

Luxuriously indulge it;

But never tempt th’ illicit rove

Tho’ naething should divulge it;

I waive the quantum of the sin

The hazard of concealing;

But, och! it hardens a’ within,

And petrifies the feeling.

“You are a particularly gentle boy,” he said (and I was startled and resented it); “it would not take many bad experiences to scar your feelings over and make you much less than the man you may otherwise become. If you seduced my daughter, I should be very angry and might hate you; the physical injury is really not very much, if indeed it is anything at all, but the psychological injury—you see I am too much caught up in the modern way of speaking to be quite able to say the spiritual injury—could be serious if we all parted bad friends. There are people, of course, to whom such things are not important, and I fear you have had a bad example, but you and Judy are not such people. So be warned, David, and be our friend always; but you will never be my daughter’s husband, and you must understand that now.”

“Why are you so determined I should never be Judy’s husband?” I asked.

“I am not determined alone,” said he. “There are many hundreds of determining factors on both sides. They are called ancestors, and there are some things in which we are wise not to defy them.”

“You mean, I’m not a Jew,” I said.

“I had begun to wonder if you would get to it,” said Dr Wolff.

“But does that matter in this day and age?” I said.

“You were born in 1928, when it began to matter terribly, and not for the first time in history,” said Dr Wolff. “But set that aside. There is another way it matters which I do not like to mention because I do not want to hurt you and I like you very much. It is a question of pride.”

We talked further, but I knew the conversation was over. They were planning to send Judy to school abroad in the spring. They would be happy to see me from time to time until then. But I must understand that the Wolffs had talked to Judy, and though Judy felt very badly, she had seen the point. And that was that.