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family in the far past—which was probable, Hillel would admit—but Hillel found that nose comfortingly manly and assured and positive, and he did not know why that should comfort him. He liked the boy’s hands, too, square and brown, with short square nails, and the brown sturdy throat and the deep rose on the broad cheekbones and the scattering of freckles on the low and pugnacious brow. Hillel was not sure about Saul’s mouth, wide and thin and mobile. It hinted of argumentation and obstinacy. All in all, the boy had a fierce and concentrated aura about him, a fierce quick way of turning his head, a rancor of temperament, which, Hillel reflected, would procure him more enemies than friends in the future.
    Hillel recalled his daughter, Sephorah—whom Deborah had wished to name Flavia or Daphne or Iris and not some offensive Jewish name. (Hillel had threatened her with Leah or Sarah or Rebecca or Miriam and so had quieted her. Sephorah was at least not unmusical.) Hillel thought of his little daughter, now almost four years, with fond passion: A beautiful golden child, with golden eyes, and affectionate manners and a humorous dimple in her cheek. She laughed at Saul and teased him. Saul, who rarely tolerated anyone, including his parents, tolerated Sephorah and “played with her during the rare intervals of his leisure, and reprimanded her, but could never reduce her to tears. She mocked him. Sephorah was not at this table, but in her nursery. Deborah delighted in her beauty, and wondered at the large golden eyes, and curled the child’s yellow hair and smeared her delicate complexion with cosmetics against the sun, and debated earnestly with her on the correct costumes to be worn at certain hours of the day, and taught her to sing. It was one of Hillel’s few joys to listen to the young voices at evening singing, first some grave song of David’s, and then the newest light song which Hillel suspected came from the noisy gutters of Tarsus, carefully rendered innocent. Hillel did not know who was the more childish and naive, his wife or his daughter. At scarcely four, Sephorah would sometimes look at her mother with sudden seriousness, her gilded eyelashes rapidly blinking, and once Hillel was positive that the little one was pitying Deborah.
    Saul, naturally, wore the white Roman tunic of preadolescence bordered with purple, on which Deborah insisted. “We are citizens of the Roman world,” Deborah said. “We are citizens of the Kingdom of,” Hillel said. Deborah thought this absurd. There was but one world, dreamed of by the ancients, ruled by peace and law, and therefore secure. “Ruled by the Roman short-sword,” Hillel would say, with rare bitterness. But to Deborah it was a safe world for her family, and that was all that was important. It did not harm, though she did this secretly for fear of Hillel, to make a quiet sacrifice in the temple of Juno, the mother of the gods and men. Juno was an exemplary mother.
    Reb Isaac always insisted that he desired and could relish “only the simplest of foods” when visiting friends, but it was well known that his wife, Leah, was a miraculous cook and had due regard for her husband’s discriminating stomach and supervised the kitchen. No one knew what Leah thought of her husband, but she had humor and her table was popular with Greek and Roman and Jew alike, and so all forgave Reb Isaac’s hypocrisy. But Deborah literally believed that he was a man of simple and austere appetite and so, when he was a guest at her husband’s table she invariably ordered the plainest of food. This delighted Hillel, who could be guilty of a gentle malice. So tonight there was only a broiled river fish unadorned by herbs, a cold boiled lamb saddle, some stewed artichokes innocent of oil and garlic and vinegar, a lank cabbage, cold bread, wilted fruit and cheap cheese and a most ordinary wine.
    As for David—the little pucker between his brows testified to his pain, and in this, too,