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yellow and black marble squares, like gold and ebony, the murals on the white walls were excellent if a little “extreme” in Hillel’s conservative opinion, and the plastered ceiling was decorated in rosettes of gold and deep blue. The furniture, the chests and screens and tables and chairs, had been fashioned in the Eastern manner to be consistent with the environment, and were of lemonwood and dark ebony and teak, elaborately carved and inlaid. Here and there were scattered bright Persian rugs of intricate pattern and delicate hue. A fresh breeze moved through the pillars of the portico and brought with it a pure country aroma. Now the bells of “heathen” temples dedicated to Serapis, Juno, Aphrodite and all the gods and goddesses of the Roman, Greek and Oriental pantheon, began to ring softly over the land, striving with each other for harmonious notes, blending together to create a background of sweet and nostalgic sound. Deborah sighed happily. Her pretty face was suffused with a glow of combined innocence and complacent pride—and stupidity—and Hillel glanced down the long table at her and loved her anew, and wondered, as he often wondered, why she did not bore him to death.
    Deborah’s brother, David, was, in Hillel’s opinion—which could be very acerbic at times—effete, ridiculous, pretentious and a parody of elegance. He was four years older then Deborah, and married to a Roman girl of a great house, and he lived more in Rome than he did in Jerusalem, and called himself “an emancipated Jew, the new Jew.” He was an intimate friend of Herod, himself, and a familiar at the court, and very rich. He had fine manners and graces, and was handsome, of Deborah’s auburn and blue coloring of hair and eyes, and beardless, of course, and fair of complexion with a Greek nose of which he was tediously proud, and a cleft white chin, and his figure was another source of his pride, for he was tall and slender. He was also too fastidious, in Hillel’s conviction, and scented like a woman, and wore many rings on his long and delicate hands. A complicated and detailed Egyptian necklace, fringed and jeweled, hung about his neck and lay on his chest. Gemmed bracelets clasped his upper arms, and a jeweled earring sparkled in one ear, and his toga was of the whitest and most shimmering silk bordered with gold, and his sandals glittered.
    Hillel always tried to despise him as a decayed traitor to his race and his God, but David was so charming, so amusing, so smiling, and even so erudite, that Hillel invariably and helplessly was seduced into fondness for him on his infrequent visits to this house. David, certainly, was a Sadducee and therefore even worse than an uninformed heathen, but he was a scholar, equally at home in discussing the Torah, Philo, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil and Homer, the latest scandals from Rome and Jerusalem and Alexandria and Athens, politics, poetry, the sciences, the stock market and banking, the state of the drachma and sesterce, the newest favorite of Caesar Augustus, the Augustales of Rome, rumors from the Palatine, architecture, archaeology, trade, commerce, and religion in all its forms, not to mention the latest fashions in living, clothing, dining and amusement.
    Once or twice, in sheer exasperation at so much sweetness and light and urbanity and composure and politeness, Hillel, the mildest of men, had attempted to provoke David into a temper or a sharp reply or a contemptuous gesture, but David never defected from his pose—if it were a pose—of a totally civilized man. He would never, Hillel would think with some unkindness, impose himself on his wife if she were unwilling, or quarrel in a vulgar way with a tradesman, or dispute with a stockbroker, or pick his nose or rub his anus, though he had no objection to a naughty story and could hint of unspeakable vilenesses of conduct of friends and acquaintances.
    Reb Isaac, the old Pharisee friend, sat munching morosely at Hillel’s