confess that he had not made inquiry. If he had known--

Dan did not hear the end of the sentence, but imagined that it ended in
a gesture of abhorrence. In his day religion was limited to the law of
Moses, a skein well combed out, but the Scribes in Jerusalem had knotted
and twisted the skein. He had heard Joseph maintain, and stiffly too,
that an egg laid on the day after the Sabbath could not be eaten,
because it had been prepared by the hen on the Sabbath. But one can't
always be watching hens, he said to himself, and the discussion of such
points seeming to him unmanly, he drew back the window-curtain and fell
into admiration of his son's slim loins and great shoulders. Joseph was
laughing with his companions at that moment and his teeth glistened,
every one white and shapely. Why do such discussions interest him? Dan
asked, for his eyes are soft as flowers; and he envied the woman that
Joseph would resort unto in the night. But very often men like Joseph
did not marry, and a new disquietude arose in his mind: he wanted
children, grandchildren. In a few years Joseph should begin to look
round.... Meanwhile it might be well to tell him that men like Hillel
had always held that it is after the spirit rather than the letter we
should strive, and that in running after the latter we are apt to lose
the former, and he accepted the first opportunity to admonish Joseph,
who listened in amazement, wondering what had befallen his father, whom
he had never heard speak like this before. All the same he hearkened to
these warnings and laid them in his memory, and fell to considering his
father as one who had just jogged along the road that he and his
ancestors had come by, without much question. But if his father had set
himself to consider religions, and with that seriousness they deserved,
he would not keep back any longer the matter on which he had long
desired to speak to him.