He avoided Logan, but Logan needed him, and came to tell him so. "It is all very well for you to shut yourself up," he said, "but I can't live without you. You know what Oliver is to me, but it is not enough. The more satisfying she is on one plane, the more I need on the other the satisfaction that she cannot give me. Women can't do it. They simply can't, and it is no good trying. If you try, it means making a mess of both love and art. She is jealous? Very well. Let her be jealous. She enjoys it, and it helps her to understand a man's passion." "I can't stand it when you talk in that cold-blooded way about women." "I'm not cold-blooded," said Logan, astonished at the adjective. "I sometimes think you are, but I am apt to think that of all English people," replied Mendel, wondering within himself if that did not explain Morrison. "Yes. I often wonder what you would be like if you were in an office, wearing a bowler hat, and going to and fro by the morning and evening train." "Why think about the impossible?" laughed Logan. "Anyhow, I'm not going to let you shut yourself up. I want to go to Paris, and I can't face three weeks alone with Oliver. Twenty-one days, sixty-three meals. No. It can't be done." "Yes, I'll go to Paris," thought Mendel. "I will go to Paris and I will forget." "You must come," urged Logan. "Madame at the Pot-au-Feu has given me the name of a hotel kept by her sister-in-law. Very cheap. Bed and breakfast, and, of course, you feed in restaurants. . . . You want digging out of your hole. I don't know why, but you seem to have insisted more on being Jewish lately. It is much more important for you to be an artist and a man. I regard you as a sacred trust. I do really. You are the only man in England for whom I have any respect, and I need you to keep me decent." He added: "I need you to keep me alive, for, without you, Oliver would gobble me up in a month." He seemed to be joking, but Mendel could not help feeling that he was at heart serious, and he had the unpleasant sinking of disgust which sometimes seized him when he thought of Logan and Oliver together. He could not account for it, and the sensation gave him a sickly pleasure which made him weaker with Logan than with anybody else. Besides, Logan often bewildered him, and he could not tolerate his inability to grasp ideas except through a mad rush of feeling, and he hated the fact that while Logan's mind seemed to move steadily on, his own crumbled to pieces just at the moment when it was on the point of absorbing an idea. For these reasons he consented to go to Paris. The three weeks should consolidate or destroy a friendship which had remained for him distressingly inchoate. Deep in his heart he hoped that it would become definite enough and strong enough to drive out his indeterminate love. To be in love without enjoying love was in his eyes a fatuous condition, undignified, vague, a kind of cuckoldry. * * * * *