The knowledge that she was a Jewish child, whose people had had a special history, was always at the back of her consciousness; sometimes it was brought to the front by the scoffing rhymes of Christian children, who informed her that they had stuck a piece of pork upon a fork and given it to a member of her race.
But far more vividly did she realize that she was an English girl; far keener than her pride in Judas Maccabaeus was her pride in Nelson and Wellington; she rejoiced to find that her ancestors had always beaten the French from the days of Cressy and Poictiers to the days of Waterloo, that Alfred the Great was the wisest of kings, and that Englishmen dominated the world and had planted colonies in every corner of it, that the English language was the noblest in the world and men speaking it had invented railway trains, steamships, telegraphs, and everything worth inventing.

Esther absorbed these ideas from the school reading books.

The experience of a month will overlay the hereditary bequest of a century.

And yet, beneath all, the prepared plate remains most sensitive to the old impressions.
Sarah and Isaac had developed as distinct individualities as was possible in the time at their disposal.

Isaac was just five and Sarah--who had never known her mother--just four.