gloomy. Then she had been interested in the congregation as
it rustled in. She thought she had never seen so many
modishly gowned women in one room in all her life. The men
were sleekly broadclothed, but they lacked the well-dressed
air, somehow. The women were slimly elegant in tailor suits
and furs. They all looked as if they had been turned out by
the same tailor. An artist, in his line, but of limited
imagination. Dr. Kirsch, sociologist and savant, aquiline,
semi-bald, grimly satiric, sat in his splendid, high-backed
chair, surveying his silken flock through half-closed lids.
He looked tired, and rather ill, Fanny thought, but
distinctly a personage. She wondered if he held them or
they him. That recalled to her the little Winnebago Temple
and Rabbi Thalmann. She remembered the frequent rudeness
and open inattention of that congregation. No doubt Mrs.
Nathan Pereles had her counterpart here, and the
hypocritical Bella Weinberg, too, and the giggling Aarons
girls, and old Ben Reitman. Here Dr. Kirsch had risen, and,
coming forward, had paused to lean over his desk and, with
an awful geniality, had looked down upon two rustling,
exquisitely gowned late-comers. They sank into their seats,
cowed. Fanny grinned. He began his lecture
something about modern politics. Fanny was fascinated
and resentful by turns. His brilliant satire probed, cut,
jabbed like a surgeon's scalpel; or he railed, scolded,
snarled, like a dyspeptic schoolmaster. Often he was in
wretched taste. He mimicked, postured, sneered. But he had
this millionaire congregation of his in hand. Fanny found
herself smiling up at him, delightedly. Perhaps this wasn't
religion, as she had been taught to look upon it, but it