It was very certain that Logan would not come. There could be nothing but futile suffering for both of them, and Logan would know that as well as he. Logan knew himself better than most men, and he must have felt the finality of that parting in the street. The breach was final and irrevocable, for Oliver was definitely a part of Logan, as much a part of him as his hand or his eyes, and Mendel hated Oliver with a pure, simple, immovable passion. He saw in her embodied the natural enemy of all that he loved: order, decency, honesty, art, and beauty. He would have liked to blot out all trace of her everywhere, but she lived most intensely in his mind. She existed for him hardly at all as a person, but as an evil, fixed will set on the destruction of Logan, of friendship, of art, of love, of beauty, of everything that lived distinctly and clearly and with a flame-like energy. She existed to drag all down into the glowing ashes of lust and lies. There were times when she became symbolical of that Christian world that had made him suffer so intensely. In her was the only discernible will of that world in which everything was losing shape and form, every flame was dying down, and everything, good and bad, was being reduced to ashes. "Good and bad?" thought Mendel. "I don't know what they mean. I know what is false and what is true. What is false I hate. What is true I love. That woman is a lie and I hate her, and I wish she were dead." Logan might hate her too, but he would always try, always hope to love her, always waste himself in trying to kindle her lust into a passion. The fool, the weak fool! Let her rot; let her drop down to her own level, where she could be decently a beast of prey, marked out to be shunned except by those who were her natural victims. Logan was too good: but if there was so much good in him, might not something be done? . . . No. Only Logan's own will could save him. Nothing could be done for him except out of pity: and who wants pity? Leave that to men like Tysoe, the kindly, emasculate fools of the world. Yet Mendel knew that he was bound to Logan. At first he thought it must be by pity, but it was deeper than that. There was not much capacity for pity in Mendel. Ruthless with himself, he could see no reason why others should be spared what he himself was ready to endure. He had never thought that others might be weaker than he. Logan, for instance, with ten years' more experience behind him, had always seemed infinitely stronger.