"But they are fools and can make themselves happy with their cinemas and their newspapers and their forward women." "I thought you liked women, Harry." "I don't like women who like me. . . . I don't want to marry, I don't want anything. I shall see the old people into their graves, and then I don't know what I shall do. You are the only one I know who has anything to live for or any life in him." "I have little enough." "Oh God! don't you start talking like me, or we shall all go to the cemetery at once." "All right, Harry. I'll keep you going. I'll keep you astonished." His brother's despondency helped Mendel on a little, but what a mean incentive to work, to astonish his poor ignorant family! Very soon there came a terrible day when he had to tell them that he had not a penny in the world and that he was a failure. It would have gone hardly with him but for Harry, who espoused his cause, saying dramatically that he believed in his young brother as he believed in God, and that Mendel should not be stopped for want of money. And he went upstairs and came down with his savings, nearly thirty pounds. "Don't be a fool!" said Jacob. "He will only spend it on drink and women." "He is a genius," said Harry simply, and Issy, fired by his brother's example, said he had saved ten pounds and he would add that. Together they shouted Jacob down when he tried to raise his voice, until at last he produced his cash-box and gave Mendel a ten-pound note, saying:-- "If the Christians are liars when they say they believe in you, we are not. You must learn that the Christians are all liars and you must show them that you are the greatest artist in the world." "I'll show them," mumbled Mendel. "Yes, I'll show them." * * * * * He returned to his work with a better determination to succeed, but he felt more barren than ever, and had nothing to work with but his will. Into that he gathered all his force and determined to go back and pick up the thread of his work at the point where Logan had broken into the weaving of it. He would paint yet another portrait of his mother, and then he would choose a subject from among the life of the Jews. He would start again. The Jews believed in him; he would glorify them, although he no longer believed in but only admired them. When he came to look at them clearly, they were squat and stunted, because he could only look at them from a superior height. . . . He turned over his early work, and studied it carefully, but he could not recover his childish acceptance of that existence. For some weeks he did not go near Morrison and frequented the Paris Café, where he felt hopelessly out of it. No one spoke to him. Hardly a soul nodded to him. Night after night he sat there despondently, conjuring up the exciting evenings he had spent there. They were like ashes in his mouth. * * * * *