A Bride of the Plains. Emma Orczy
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he reiterated with forced suavity, "she is my friend, is she not?"
"She may be your friend, Béla," rejoined Elsa gently, "and she certainly belongs to this village; but she is not one of us. She is a Jewess, not a Hungarian, like we all are."
"What has her religion to do with it?" he retorted.
"It isn't her religion, Béla," persisted the girl, with obstinacy at least as firm as his own; "you know that quite well. Though it is an awful thing to think that they crucified our Lord."
"Well! that is a good long while ago," he sneered; "and in any case Klara and Ignácz Goldstein had nothing to do with it."
"No, I know. Therefore I said that religion had nothing to do with it. I can't explain it exactly, Béla, but don't we all feel alike about that? Hungarians are Hungarians, and Jews are Jews, and there's no getting away from that. They are different to us, somehow. I can't say how, but they are different. They don't speak as we do, they don't think as we do, their Sunday is Saturday, and their New Year's day is in September. Jewesses can't dance the csárdás and Jews have a contempt for our gipsy music and our songs. They are Jews and we are Hungarians. It is altogether different."
He shrugged his shoulders, unable apparently to gainsay this unanswerable argument. After all, he too was a Hungarian, and proud of that fact, and like all Hungarians at heart, he had an unexplainable contempt for the Jews. But all the same, he was not going to give in to a woman in any kind of disagreement, least of all on a point on which he had set his heart. So now he shifted his ground back to his original dictum.
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