"Very well," he answered, feeling that the whole world had come to an end. "Very well." She called Clowes, who had stayed just inside the door, and together, like little frightened children, they crept downstairs. "Good-bye love!" said Mendel. "My God, what rubbish, what folly, what nonsense! Love and a Christian girl! That's over. That's finished. I am outside it all--outside, outside, outside. Oh! Dark and vile and bitter, and no sweetness anywhere but in my own thoughts!" Inside the room someone began to sing:-- I want to be, I want to be, I want to be down home in Dixie. . . . Oh! the mad folly of these Christians, with their childish songs, their idiotic pleasures, their preposterous belief in happiness. . . . Happiness! They ruin the world to satisfy their childish longing, and all their happiness lies in words and foolish songs. . . . The rhythm of the pianola tunes began to beat in his head, and another deeper rhythm came up from the depths of his soul and tried to break through them. It was the same rhythm that always came up when he had reached the lowest depths of misery. It came gushing forth like water from the rock of Moses, and crept through his being like ice, up, up into his thoughts, bringing him to an intolerable agony. In the room glasses clinked. He turned towards the light and plunged into the carouse. VI REVELATION THREE weeks later the exhibition of Modern French Art was opened in an important gallery in the West End. It roused indignation, laughter, scorn, and made such a stir in the papers that public interest was excited and the exhibition was an unparalleled success. People from the suburbs, people who had never been to a picture gallery in their lives, flocked to see the show, and most of them, when they left, said: "Well, at any rate we've had a good laugh." Mendel never read the papers and knew nothing at all about it. These three weeks had been a time of blank misery for him. He could not work. His people set his teeth on edge. He could not bear to see a soul, for he could not talk. When he met friends and acquaintances, not a word could he find to say to them. There was nothing to say. They were living in a world from which he had been expelled. More than once he was on the point of going to his father and asking to be taken into the workshop, since the only possible, the only bearable life was one of hard manual labour, which left no room for spiritual activity, none for happiness, and very little for unhappiness.