It was that night I went to Knopwood. I was working up a rage against the Wolffs. A question of pride! Did that mean I wasn’t good enough for Judy? And what did all this stuff about being Jews mean from people who gave no obvious external evidence of their Jewishness? If they were such great Jews, where were their side-curls and their funny underwear and their queer food? I had heard of these things as belonging to the bearded Jews in velours hats who lived down behind the Art Gallery. I had assumed the Wolffs and the Schwarzes were trying to be like us; instead I had been told I wasn’t good enough for them! Affronted Christianity boiled up inside me. Christ had died for me, I was certain, but I wouldn’t take any bets on His having died for the Wolffs and the Schwarzes! Off to Knopwood! He would know.

I was with him all evening, and in the course of an involved conversation everything came out. To my astonishment he sided with Louis Wolff. But worst of all, he attacked Father in terms I had never heard from him, and he was amused, and contemptuous and angry about Myrrha.

“You triple-turned jackass!” he said, “couldn’t you see it was an arranged thing? And you thought it was your own attraction that got you into bed with such a scarred old veteran! I don’t blame you for going to bed with her; show an ass a peck of oats and he’ll eat it, even if the oats is musty. But it is the provincial vulgarity of the whole thing that turns my stomach—the winesmanship and the tatty gallantries and the candlelit frumpery of it! The ‘good talk,’ the imitations of Churchill by your father, the quotations from The Rubaiyat. If I could have my way I’d call in every copy of that twenty-fourth-rate rhymed gospel of hedonism and burn it! How it goes to the hearts of trashy people! So Myrrha matched verses with you, did she? Well, did the literary strumpet quote this—

“ ‘Well,’ murmured one, ‘Let whoso make or buy,

My Clay with long Oblivion is gone dry:

But fill me with the old familiar Juice

Methinks I might recover by and by.’

Did she whisper that in your ear as Absalom went in unto his father’s concubine?”

“You don’t understand,” I said; “this is a thing French families do to see that their sons learn about sex in the right way.”

“Yes, I have heard that, but I didn’t know they put their cast mistresses to the work, the way you put a child rider on your safe old mare.”

“That’s enough, Knoppy,” I said; “you know a lot about the Church and religion, but I don’t think that qualifies you to talk about what it is to be a swordsman.”

That made him really furious. He became cold and courteous.

“Help me then,” he said. “Tell me what a swordsman is and what lies behind the mystique of the swordsman.”