"I will," he said, "when the spring comes. I am going to be an artist, but I am afraid it will not mean carriages and horses and the King commanding his portrait to be painted." * * * * * He had the very great joy of beginning to understand Cézanne's delight in the intellectual craft of painting and to see why he had neglected the easier delights of handicraft and the mere pleasure of the eye. But the more he understood, the harder it became to finish his picture. He slaved at it, but there was still no beauty in it. He would not surrender. It would have been so easy to slip back to fake a pictorial quality. He had only to go to the National Gallery to come out with his head buzzing with ideas and impressions. He had only to go into the street to have a thousand mental notes from which to give his work a human and dramatic quality. He stuck to it and slaved away until he was forced to give in. "You devil!" he said, as he shook his fist at the picture. "You empty jug!" But there was some satisfaction in it, unfinished failure as it was, and he wanted Morrison to see it. He wrote and asked her to come. * * * * * She and Clowes were in the country, painting, and they wired to him to come and stay with them for a week. Clowes wrote to tell him that she could put him up in the farm of which her cottage was a part. With her letter he went racing over to see his mother. "I'm going away," he said, "I'm going away to the country. The Christian girl has a house in the country and I am going to stay in it." "You will have fresh air and new milk to make you well again," cried Golda, scarcely able to contain her joy at seeing him once more his happy, elated, robustious self. "You will be well again, but you should have done with that nonsense about the Christian girl. A sparrow does not mate with a robin, and a cock robin is what you are." "Yes. I'm a robin," said Mendel, and he whistled blithely, "Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! I shall go on the halls as a whistler. Tit-a-weet! and I shall make three hundred pounds a week. Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet!" Golda laughed at him till the tears ran, so happy was she to have him come back to her. "It is not nonsense about the Christian girl," he said. "She is going to turn me into a Public School gentleman, and I shall bring her to see you, so that you can know for yourself that it is not nonsense." "It is not the girl who is nonsensical, but you." "Tit-a-weet!" "I will bake her a Jewish bread and you shall take it to her. Yes. Bring her to me and I will thank her for bearing with you." "Tit-a-weet! Tit-a-weet!" "Cock robin!" * * * * * His luggage consisted of a brown-paper parcel, a paint-box and two canvases. Morrison met him at the station. She was glowing with health and good spirits and began to tease him at once about his luggage, of which she insisted on taking charge.