"I can't bear it," said Mendel; "I can't bear it. It was bad enough when she kept quiet, but now that she gives herself airs and talks, I can't stand it. I hate her so that I feel as if the top of my head would blow off. . . . Perhaps there was nothing much in what she said. Perhaps it was only a slow growing detestation coming to a head. But there it is. It is final. I have tried to like her, to be decent to her, to make allowances for her, but it is impossible." "You don't mean you are not going to come to see us again?" "Yes. That is what I do mean. She doesn't exist for me any longer. If I met her in a café or in the streets she would be all right. She would be in her place. There would be some truth in her. In connection with you she is a festering lie." "She can't settle down to it," replied Logan lamely, ashamed of his inability to defend Oliver from this onslaught. Defence would be quite useless, for he knew that Mendel would detect his untruth. If only Mendel were a little older, if only he could have grown out of youth's dreadful inability to compromise. "She can't settle down," Logan continued. "She is a creature of enormous vitality and she has no life outside herself, no imagination. Can't you see that her vitality has no outlet? I don't know, but it seems to me appalling to think of these modern women with their independence, and nothing at all to do with it. They won't admit the authority of the male, and they have broken out of the home. A lot of them refuse to have children. I feel sorry for them." "Don't go on talking round and round the subject," cried Mendel wrathfully. He was really alarmed and pained as he saw himself being carried nearer and nearer to a breach with his friend. "I can't feel sorry for her and I don't. She is ruining you. You never laugh nowadays. You are always more dead than alive, and I cannot bear to see you with her. I cannot bear even to think of you with her." "For God's sake, don't talk like that!" muttered Logan, quickening his pace to keep up, for Mendel was flying along. "You must either give her up or me," said Mendel.