He was entirely unconscious in his egoism, and Edward was so generous a creature that he was not shocked or offended by it. He was a Quaker and as simple in his faith as a peasant, and he was young enough to know how difficult it was for the boy to expose his thoughts. After he had listened to his outpourings he would lead the boy on to talk of his experiences at the stained-glass factory. Mendel had a wonderful gift of vivid narration. Everything was so real to him, he had no reason to respect anything in the outside world unless it compelled the homage of his instinct, and in his broken Cockney English he could give the most dramatic descriptions of everything he saw and did. When he was engaged upon such tales, helping them out with wonderful mimicry, he had no shyness and laid bare his feelings as though they were also a part of the external scene. Edward knew nothing at all about painting, but he could respond to quality in a human being, and he recognized that here was no ordinary boy. His first impulse was to rescue him from his surroundings, support him, send him to school. But what a Hell that would be for the sensitive foreigner brought face to face with the ruthless force of an ancient tradition! Edward himself had suffered enough from being such an oddity as a Quaker, but to send this Jew, who had learned nothing and had none but his natural manners, to a Public School would be an act of cruelty. Besides, the boy would not hear of being parted from his mother, whom he was never tired of praising. He told Edward quite solemnly that his mother had said things far more beautiful than anything in Keats or Milton and that no book could ever have held anything more moving than her descriptions of the life at home in Austria, with the Jews in their gaberdines with their long curls hanging by their ears, and the foolish peasants in their bright clothes, and the splendid officers who clapped children into prison if they splashed their great shining boots with mud. . . . As he listened Edward felt more and more convinced that it was his duty not to allow this rich nature to be swallowed up in the grey squalor of the slums. He had begun his philanthropic work believing that Oxford had much to give to the poor, and he had come in time to realize that the world of which Oxford was the romantic symbol stood sorely in need of much that the poor had to give. Mendel confirmed and strengthened an impression which had for some time been disturbing Edward's peace of mind. He felt that if he could help the boy he would be translating his perception into action.