"Foolish, foolish, foolish!" she said. "If you loved me one tenth part as much as I love you, you would know what I mean." "I don't," he said simply. "I don't, honestly I don't. Perhaps you are so beautiful to me that I am blinded with it." Of the truth of her feeling against him he had no doubt, but though he laboured bitterly to understand it, he could make nothing of it. He was driven back on his simple need for her. "Very well," he said; "if it makes you feel like that for me to touch you, I never will. Only don't talk of loving me more than I love you. It isn't true." "Yes. It was silly of me to say that," she agreed. "It isn't true." "What do you want, then?" "I want to share as much of your life as I can." "It is a bleak, grimy business, a good deal of it." "I want to share it." "There is a good deal in it that will horrify you." "I must get used to that. . . . When I am in London I want you to promise that you will see me at least once a week." "There are seven days in the week. Let it be seven times." She laughed at that. "And some day," she went on, "I want to take you down into the country." He began to suspect her of wanting to meddle with his work. "I don't want the country," he rapped out. "I am a Londoner. All the life I care about is in the streets and in the houses, in the restaurants and the shops, and the costers' barrows and the cinemas and the picture galleries. That is why I live here, because I love the coarse, thrumming vitality all round me." "But _I_ want the country," she said, "and you should know the life _I_ love." For a moment it seemed to him that the key to the mystery she talked of was in his hands. He clutched at it and it evaded him, but his idolatry of her was shaken, and he began dimly to see her as a creature like himself, with feelings, thoughts, desires, and a will. There was no doubt at all about the will, and he had to recognize it. VIII OLIVER THEN began a period of quiet, happy friendship for them both. Mendel was astonishingly amenable to many of her disciplinary suggestions and allowed her to cut his hair (though not without thinking of Delilah), and when she ordered him to get some new clothes he went off obediently to a friend of Issy's and had a suit made--West End style at East End prices. "You will soon have me looking like a Public School gentleman," he said. "Never!" she replied. "You will never move like one--thank goodness." "Why thank goodness?" "Because they walk about as though they owned the earth and the fatness thereof, as though the earth existed for them to walk about on it without their needing even to look at it to see how beautiful it is." "That's like Logan," he said. "He used always to be railing against the English. He said they had no eyes, only stomachs. But I think the English must be the nicest people in the world, for there is no place like London for living in."