In her inmost heart Golda was alarmed. For the first time she began to realize the vast powerful London with which she was surrounded. At home, in Austria, people stole because they were poor, because they were starving. She herself had often sent Harry and Issy out into the market with a sack and a spiked stick with which to pick up potatoes and cabbages and bread, but here the old simplicity was lacking. The swagger and the magnitude of Mr. Kuit's operations and her son-in-law's frauds alarmed her, and she felt that no good could come of it. They belonged to some power which moved too fast for her, and it was being invoked for Mendel, her youngest-born, her treasure. Truly it was a black day that took Jacob from her. Where he was, there was simplicity. Everything was kept in its place when he was in authority. Everything was kept down on the earth. There was the good smell of the earth in all his dealings, all his emotions. Never in him was the easy fantastic excitement of Kuit and Moscowitsch . . . They were mad. Surely they were mad. Their excitement infected everybody. Golda could feel it creeping in her veins like a poison. It came from the world to which these men belonged, the world of prison. That one word expressed it all for Golda. She had only been out into it to go to the prison, and to her that seemed to be the cold empty centre of it all. The bustle and glitter of the streets led to the prison, and she had always to fight to get back into her own life, where things were simple and definite--ugly, maybe--but clear and actual. . . . And now into that world of hectic excitement playing about the prison and about Mendel was to go, to be she knew not what, to learn to play with brushes and colours, to practise tricks which seemed to her not essentially different from Mr. Kuit's sleight with the cards. She was sure no good could come of it; but for the present the boy had his happiness, and to that she yielded. IV FIRST LOVE FOR Mendel every day became romantic, though he suffered tortures of shyness and used to bolt like a rabbit through the doors of the Polytechnic, rush upstairs to his easel, and never raise his eyes from it except to gaze at the objects placed before him. He worked in a frenzy, convinced that it was his business to translate the object on to the canvas. When he had done that he felt that the object had no further existence. It ought to vanish as completely as his consuming interest in it. As a matter of fact, it never did vanish, but it was lost in the praises of Mr. Sivwright, and the young women and old ladies who attended the class. The first task set the class after he joined it was a ginger-beer bottle, of which his rendering was declared to be a marvel, even to the high light on the marble in the neck of the bottle.