“It is a dream, far-off. In England hardly even that.” There was a blankness before him. Unconscious of his youth, and his radiating charm, distilled from the modern world; Frenchman, Russian, philosophical German-brained, he sat there white-faced, an old old Jew, immeasurably old, cut off, alone with his conviction, facing the blank spaces of the future. Why could he not be content to be a European? She swayed, dragging at the knot. In his deeply saturated intelligence there still was a balance on the side from which he had declared to his father, that he was first a man; then a Jew. By the accidents of living, this might be cherished. The voices of the night cried out against the treachery. She glanced remorsefully across at him and recognised with a sharp pang of pity, in his own eyes, the well-known eyes wide open towards the darkness where she sat invisible, the look he had described … wehmütig ; in spite of his sheltered happy prosperous youth it was there; he belonged to those millions whose sufferings he had revealed to her, a shadow lying forever across the bright unseeing confidence of Europe, hopeless. And now, at this moment, standing out from their midst the strange beautiful Old Testament figure in modern clothes; the fine beautifully moulded Hebrew head, so like his own. …
“But it is extraordinary; that just when everything is at its worst, this idea should have arisen. … It’s all very well for people to laugh at Micawber.”
“Who is this man?”
“The man who is always waiting for something to turn up. Things do turn up, exactly at the right moment. It doesn’t mean fatalism. I don’t believe in laisser-aller as a principle; but there is something in things, something the people who make plans and think they are thinking out everything in advance, don’t know; their oblivion of it, while they go busily on knowing exactly what they are going to do and why, even at picnics, is a terrible thing. And somehow they always fail.”