Downstairs he heard Issy come in for his dinner, and there was the usual snarling row because Rosa cooked so vilely. Mendel compared Issy's life and his own: Issy working day in, day out, earning just enough to keep himself alive. Why did he go on with it? Why did he keep himself alive? Why did he not clear out, like Harry? There was no pleasure in his life, neither the time nor the money for it. . . . A wretched business. But was it less wretched than this business of painting? There was more money in painting, and that was all anybody seemed to think of. People wanted the same picture over and over again, and if he consented to please them, his life would be just as poor a thing as Issy's, except that he would have pleasure, and, through his friends, an occasional taste of luxury. At best he could be polite and gentlemanly, like Mitchell, bringing no more to art and getting no more out of it than a boyish excitement, as though art were a game and could give no more than a sensation of cleanliness, like a hot bath. No, it would not do. It would not do. It was a lie, too, to say that the Jews only cared about money. When they were overfed, like Maurice Birnbaum, they were like all the other overfed people, but when they were simple and normal they were better than the others, because they had always a sense of mystery and did not waste themselves in foolish laughter. That was where Logan was true. He could laugh, because all the Christians laugh, but when it came to solemn things he could talk about them as though he were not half ashamed. Mitchell, for instance, always shied away from the truth. Why was he afraid of it? The truth, good or bad, was always somehow beautiful, invigorating, and releasing. All the pleasant things that Mitchell cared about Mendel found stifling. Nothing, he knew, could make life altogether pleasant, and all the falsehoods which were used in that attempt were contemptible. They strangled impulse and frankness, and without these how could there be art? In his unhappy dreams Logan appeared like a figure of Blake, immense, looming prophetic, beckoning to achievement and away from the chatter and fuss of the world of artists. Yet behind Logan there was still the figure of Mitchell, young and gay, and the idea of Mitchell led to the idea of Morrison. There were some withered flowers on his painting-table, the last she had sent him. None had come since that evening in the Paris Café when she had nodded curtly to show him that he was not wanted.