The Model of Sorrows by Israel Zangwill

This letter seemed decisive. I did not trouble Mr. Conn to English the Yiddish epistle. My imagination saw too clearly Quarriar himself dictating its luridly romantic phraseology. Such counter-plots, coils, treasons, and stratagems in so simple a matter! How Quarriar could even think them plausible I could not at first imagine; and with my anger was mingled a flush of resentment at his low estimate of my intellect.

After-reflection instructed me that he wrote as a Russian to whom apparently nothing mediaeval was strange. But at the moment I had only the sense of outrage and trickery. All these months I had been fed upon lies. Day after day I had been swathed with them as with feathers. I had so pledged my reputation as a reader of character that he would appear with his three younger children, bear every test, and be triumphantly vindicated. And in that moment of hot anger and wounded pride I had almost slashed through my canvas and mutilated beyond redemption that kingly head. But it looked at me sadly with its sweet majesty, and I stayed my hand, almost persuaded to have faith in it still. I began multiplying excuses for Quarriar, figuring him as misled by his neighbours, more skilled than he in playing upon philanthropic heart-strings; he had been told, doubtless, that two daughters made no impression upon the flinty heart of bureaucratic charity, that in order to soften it one must 'increase and multiply. ' He had got himself into a network of falsehood from which, though his better nature recoiled, he had been unable to disentangle himself. But then I remembered how even in Russia he had pursued an illegal calling, how he had helped a friend to evade military service, and again I took up my knife. But the face preserved its reproachful dignity, seemed almost to turn the other cheek. Illegal calling! No; it was the law that was illegal -- the cruel, impossible law, that in taking away all means of livelihood had contorted the Jew's conscience.