Painting was truly a joy to him. He loved the actual dabbling with the colours, laying them out on his palette, mixing them, evolving rare shades; he loved the fiery concentration and absorption in the making of a picture; the renewed power of sight when he turned from a picture to the world; the glorious nervous energy that came thrilling through his fingers in moments of concentration; the feeling of the superiority of this power to all others in the world. And so, whatever happened, he turned to his easel and painted. Love, debt, passion, quarrels, all the disturbances of life came and went, but painting remained, inexhaustible. So he had been happy, free, unfettered, gay, avoiding all responsibility because it was his formula that the artist's only responsibility is to his art. He was doubly happy now because he knew he had made an impression on a young man whose sincerity and vigour of purpose he could not but respect. He was himself singularly impressionable, and like a sponge for sucking up the colour of any strong personality. And Mendel had the further attraction for him that he was pure London, of the shifting, motley London that Logan, as a provincial, adored. This London he had touched at many points, but never through a strong living soul that had, and most loyally acknowledged, London as its home. Logan's visit to Mendel in the East End had been one of the great events of his life. Through it he had found his feet where he had been floundering, though, of course, happily and excitedly enough. He told himself that now he was going to settle down to work, to the great productive period of his life, such as was vouchsafed to every real artist who was tough enough to pay for it in suffering. He would rescue Mendel's genius from the Detmold and the ossified advanced painters, and together they would smash the English habit of following French art a generation late, and they would lay the foundations of a genuine English art, a metropolitan art, an art that grew naturally out of the life of the central city of the world. Logan always worked by programme, but hitherto he had changed his programme once a week. Now he was sure that this was the programme of his life. It would be amended, of course, by inspiration, but its groundwork was permanent. He was enthusiastic over it. . . . Of course, this was what he had always been seeking, and hitherto he had been fighting the London which absorbed the talents of the country, masticated them, digested them, and evacuated them in the shape of successful painters for whom neither life nor art had any meaning, or in the shape of vicious wrecks who crawled from public-house to public-house and died in hospitals.