FLUNG into the art school, he was like a leggy colt in a new field, very shy of it at first, of the trees in the hedges, of the shadows cast by the trees. This place was very different from the Polytechnic. There were fewer old ladies, and more boys of his own age. The teachers were Professors, and the pupils held them in awe and respect. There were real models in the life-class, male and female, and the students, male and female, worked together. No ginger-beer bottles here, where art was a practical business. The school existed for the purpose of teaching the craft of making pictures, and its law was that the basis of the mystery was drawing. Mendel's first attitude towards the other students was that he was there to beat them all. He would swell with eagerness and enthusiasm, and tell himself that he had something that they all lacked. He would watch their movements, their heads bending over their work, their hands scratching away at the paper, and he could see that they had none of them the vigour that was in himself. And by way of showing how much stronger he was he would use his pencil almost as though it were a chisel and his paper a block of stone out of which he was to carve the likeness of the model. He was rudely taken down when the Professor stood and stared with his melancholy eyes at his production and said:-- "Is that the best you can do?" "Yes." "Why do it?" This was a stock phrase of the Professor's, but Mendel did not know that, and he was ashamed and outraged when the class tittered. "No," said the Professor. "I don't know what that is. It certainly isn't drawing." And with his pencil he made a lovely easy sketch of the model, alongside Mendel's black, forbidding scrawl. It was a masterly thing and it baffled him, and humiliated him because the Professor moved on to the next pupil without another word. Not another line could Mendel draw that day. He sat staring at the Professor's sketch and at his own drawing, which, while he had been doing it, had meant so much to him, and he still preferred his own. The Professor's drawing had no meaning for him. He could not understand it, except that it was accurate. That he could see, but then his own was accurate too, and true to what he had seen. The light gave the model a distorted shoulder, and he had laboured to render that distortion, which the Professor had either ignored or had corrected. Mendel cut out the Professor's drawing and took it home and copied it over and over again, but still he could not understand it. He was in despair and told Golda he would never learn. "I shall never learn to draw, and the Christian kops will all beat me," he said. "But they sent you to the school because you can draw. Didn't Mr. Froitzheim say that you could draw!" "The Professor looks at me with his gloomy face, like an undertaker asking for the body, and he says: 'I mean to say, that isn't drawing. It isn't impressionism. I don't know what it is.'"