"And if that doesn't make them see how damned awful their Public School system is in its effect on women, I'll eat my hat. You've had your revenge, my boy. You have shown her up. Why don't you call it _The Foolish Virgin_? Of all the mischievous twaddle that is talked in this mischievous twaddling country the notion of love is the worst. You can't love a woman unless you live with her, and a woman is incapable of loving a man unless he lives with her. By Jove! We'll hang it and my portrait of Oliver side by side in the exhibition, and I'll call mine _The Woman who Did._" "I won't have them side by side," said Mendel. "I want our pictures kept separate. I don't want it said that we are working together." "But we _are_ working together." "Yes. But along our own lines. We're only together really in our independence. You said yourself that we didn't want to found a school." "That's true," replied Logan, "but I don't see why we shouldn't have our little joke." "I don't joke with art," said Mendel grimly, and that settled the matter. It was the first time he had set his will against his friend's, and he was surprised to find how soft Logan was. Surely, then, it was he who was the leader, he who was blazing the new trail for art. . . . He had to bow to the fact that Logan had a programme while he had none. However, having once asserted his will, he became critical, and was not again the docile little disciple he had been. Logan wanted to draw up a manifesto for the catalogue, to enunciate the first principles of modern art, namely, that a picture must have (_a_) not merely a subject, but a conception based on but not bounded by its subject; (_b_) form, meaning the form dictated by the logic of the conception, which must of necessity be different from the logic dictated by the subject, which would lead either to the preconceptions and prejudices of the schools or to irrelevant and non-pictorial considerations. All this was set out at some length, and appended were a number of maxims, such as:-- "In art the important thing is art. "Abstraction precedes selection. "Art exists to keep in circulation those spiritual forces, such as æsthetic emotion, which are denied in ordinary human communications. "Photography has released art from its ancient burden of representation," etc., etc. With the spirit of this manifesto Mendel was in agreement, though he could make but little of its letter. He refused to agree to it because so much talk seemed to him unnecessary. "If we can say what we mean to say in paint, then we need not talk. If we cannot say it in paint, then we have no right to talk." "You'd soon bring the world to a standstill," said Logan, "if you limited talk to the people who have a right to it. It is just those people who never open their mouths. I think it is criminal of them, just out of shyness and disgust, to give the buffoons and knaves an open field."