And yet he could not tell how this miracle was accomplished. No words could explain it--abstraction, composition, design, none of these words helped at all. It was not so much the doing of the thing, the art of the painter, as the setting out of the woman on the canvas without reference to anything in heaven or earth, or any idea, or any emotion or desire. It was enough that she was a woman, not especially beautiful, not particularly remarkable. So perfect a vision had no need to be tender or affectionate or sensual, or to call in aid any of the emotions of life. It needed no force but the rare religious ecstasy which has no need of ideas or common human feelings, and this vision of a woman gave Mendel a new appreciation of life and love and art. It gave human beings a new value. It was enough that they were alive and upon the earth with all that they contained of good and evil. They were in themselves wonderful, and there was no need to worry about whence they came or whither they were going, or what was their relation to God and the universe. In each man, each woman was enough of God and of the universe to keep them poised for their little hour. What, then, was love? What but the sense of being poised, of being borne up by God, an intimation that could only be won through contact with life at its purest. And beyond that again lay a further degree of purity which could only find expression in art, since life, even at its rarest, was too gross. Often Mendel kissed his reproduction reverently and hugged it to his bosom, thinking childishly that some of its spirit could enter into him by contact. He whispered to it:-- "I love you. You are my truth and my joy rising up through life, even from its very depths, and shaking free of it at last into pure, serene beauty. You weigh neither upon my senses nor upon my thoughts, but, following you, they are joined together to become a high sense which can know deliverance." Followed days of a supreme delight. He wandered through the streets seeing all men and all women and all things as wonderful, since through them all flowed this lovely spirit which in the few men here and there could find its freedom and its expression in form. Through Thompson he met a journalist who was writing a book about the new painting, and from him he learned the little that was known about Cézanne: how he worked away experimenting unsuccessfully until he was middle-aged, and then withdrew from the world of artists in Paris, to live the life of a simple country bourgeois and to paint the vision which he had begun to divine: and how he painted out in the fields, leaving his canvases in the hedges and by the wayside, because not the painting but the expression of his spirit and the solution of his problem mattered to him: and how he never sold a single picture, never attempted to sell them.