However, the matter could not be postponed for long, because money was very scarce and the boy must be put into the way of providing for himself. Golda asked Abramovich to find out what an artist was and how much a week could be made at the trade. Abramovich came in one evening with a note-book full of facts and figures. He had read of a picture being sold for tens of thousands of pounds, and this had made a great impression on him. Mendel was called down from the room in which he had exiled himself. "Well?" said Abramovich kindly. "So you want to be an artist? But how?" "I don't know. I shall paint pictures." "But who will feed you? Who will buy you paints, brushes?" "I shall sell my pictures." "Where, then? How?" "To the shops." "Where are the shops? Tell me of any shop near here, for I don't know a single one." Again Mendel felt that they were too clever for him, and he was on the brink of another fit of despair when, fortunately for him, Mr. Macalister, a commercial traveller in furs, came in. When he was in London he made a point of calling on the Kühlers, whom he liked, much as he liked strong drink. He was a man of some attainments, a student of Edinburgh, who had found the ordinary walks and the ordinary people of life too tame for his chaotic and vigorous temper, and he went from place to place collecting just such strange people as these Polacks, as he used to call them. He looked for passion in men and women, and accepted it gratefully and even greedily wherever he found it. . . . He had red hair and a complexion like a white-heart cherry, with little twinkling eyes as blue as forget-me-nots. He kindled at once to the passion with which Mendel was bursting, stooped over Golda's hand and kissed it--for he knew that was how foreigners greeted a lady--and then he sat heavily waiting for the situation to be explained to him. Mendel instinctively appealed to him. . . . Oh yes! he knew what an artist was, and some painters had made tidy fortunes, though they were not the best of them. There were Reynolds, and Lawrence, and Raeburn, and Landseer, and some young fellows at Glasgow, and Michael Angelo--a tidy lot, indeed. Never a Jew, that he had heard of. "I told you so!" said Abramovich. Golda showed Mr. Macalister the boy's pictures, and he was genuinely impressed, especially by a picture of three oranges in a basket. "It's not," he said, "that they make you want to eat them, as that they make you look at them as you look at oranges. I'll look closer at every orange I see now. That's talent. Yes. That's talent. Aye." Mendel was so grateful to him that he forgot the others and began to point out to him how well the oranges were painted, with all their fleshiness and rotundity brought out. And very soon they were all laughing at him, and that made the meeting happier.