For Mendel this was the wildest and rarest adventure yet. It was a flinging of his cap over the windmills, and with it he had the sense of losing all his troubles, all his perplexities. Nothing for the time being seemed to matter very much. He had always been denied colour, and here he had the right to use it because it had been used by other men rightly. In the world of art, or rather of artists, he had always been a sort of Ishmael, ever since he had outgrown being a prodigy, and here was a new world of art where he could be free. . . . True, he had seen the same things in Paris and had not thought much of them, but so much had happened since then, and he had passed through the greatest crisis of his life. Always after his crises he expected to find himself, and now he thought he had surely done so. He would be entirely free, completely independent. For three weeks he lived between his studio and the gallery, studying these strange new vibrant pictures and experimenting with their manners as now this, now that painter influenced him. Picasso baffled him altogether. These queer, violent, angular patterns actually hurt him, and he was repelled by their intellectual intensity. Gauguin he found too easy, Van Gogh too incoherent. It was when he came to Cézanne that he was bowled out and reduced to impotence and all the egoistic excitement oozed out of him. He was not so free then. Here was an art before which he must be humbled and subdued if he was to understand it at all. He abandoned his experiments and made no attempt to work at all, but bought a reproduction of Cézanne's portrait of his wife and spent many days poring over it. It held him and fascinated him, and yet it looked almost like the unfinished work of an amateur who could not draw. Of psychological interest the picture was bare. It was just a portrait of a woman at peace, with her hands folded in her lap, bathed in a serenity beyond mortal understanding, though not beyond mortal perception, since a man had rendered it in paint. It released directly the swift, soaring emotion which, though it was roused in him by many pictures and by some poetry--passages in the Bible, for instance--was quickly entangled in sensual pleasure and never properly set free. Here, the more he gazed the more that emotion, pure, disinterested, unearthly, rushed through him, exploring all the caverns in his imagination and delivering from them new powers of perception. He felt, as he told Logan afterwards, like a tree putting out its leaves in the spring.