On her part, as she came more nearly to see his point of view, she was often shaken and tempted to admit that he was right. There was no looseness or formlessness about his ideas. He lived in a world that apparently made room for everything, a world in which he stood solidly on his feet while the waves of life broke upon him, and he only absorbed into himself that which his passions needed. It was a plain, simple world, where good and evil were equally true, and, apparently, largely a matter of chance--a world in which he was gloriously independent. But was he free? Sometimes she thought that he was amazingly free. His only prejudice seemed to be against pink, fleshy young men who had to do nothing for a living--young men like her brothers, for instance, of whom she had drawn an amusing series of caricatures showing the effect of introducing Mendel to them. . . . Sometimes she wondered if her own longing for freedom was not just her ignorance, just a craven desire to escape from knowing anything about life, to remain an amused but fundamentally indifferent onlooker. And when she had to face the suffering she inflicted on him, then she was often moved to cry out within herself:-- "Oh! Take me, take me! Have your will. It will make an end of it all, and you will pass on and forget me, but you will no longer suffer through me." But she could not bend her own will, which insisted that the treasure she desired lay through him, and that he needed it even more than she. It was because of his need that he clung to her through all his suffering and exasperation. . . . Why, why was he so blind that he could not see it? Why could he, who was so sure and so strong, not see what was to her so clear through all her vacillation and all the confusion of her idealism? . . . She tried to make him read English poetry, but he could make little of it, and said none of it was worth the Bible. He declared that Shelley wrote romantical nonsense, because men could never be made perfect, and it was cruelly absurd to try it--like dressing a monkey up in human clothes. And he countered by making her read "Candide." "When you have been through as much as Cunegonde," he said, "I'll believe in your purity." "It isn't purity that I'm fussing about." "What is it, then?" "Don't let us begin it all over again." They found common ground in Blake, whom Mendel consented to read because Blake was the only English painter who had had any idea of art at all. Blake brought them much closer together, and their tussles were sharper, but less futile and exasperating. "Why don't you take a lesson from Mrs. Blake?" he asked, after they had read the Life. "What? And sit and hold your hand? You'd turn round and hit me." "I believe I would," he laughed. "By Jove! I believe I would." * * * * * He was not easy for her to handle. It was like playing with high explosives, save that she was not playing. She said to him once, when they had come very near the intimacy she desired:--