Alone with her in the evenings or with some chance acquaintance, during the holidays he roamed through London, basking in the summer evenings, discovering unimagined splendours, the Parks, the river, the Zoo, boating on the Serpentine, the promenade on the romantic Spaniard's Road at Hampstead. Nearly every night he wrote to Mitchell in the country, describing his new easy happiness in his work and his discovery of the charm of nights in London. And once a week Mitchell would write to him and give him a delightful account of English country life in a valley, shut in by rolling hills between which wandered a slow, pleasant stream. Here Mitchell was painting, boating, playing tennis, making love. "There's a Detmold girl lives near here with her people--Greta Morrison. You may remember her--glorious chestnut hair, big blue eyes, but as shy as a little mouse. I couldn't get a word out of her until I began to talk about you, and there's no end to her appetite for that. I don't mince matters. I tell her exactly what you are, exactly what you come from, and what a wild beast you are. She has seen you throw things about at the Detmold, and she seems absolutely to like it. Yet she is not a fool, and I like her enormously. She makes me feel what a rotter I am, but I can't get on with her unless I talk about you. I _have_ heard that her work is good, but she won't show me a thing." Mendel was pleased that a "top-knot" should be interested in him, but beyond the flicker of delight he gave no thought to the idea of Greta Morrison. The "top-knots" belonged to the world which he was going to despoil with Hetty Finch. That world must disgorge. It had condemned, and still condemned, his father and mother to bitter poverty, and he remembered how on their first coming to London the whole family had slept in one room, and how he had sat up in the middle of the night and looked at the recumbent bodies and suffered under the indignity of it. And his brothers had grown from ruddy, bronzed boys into pale-faced, worn young men. And behind Hetty was the dirty lodging-house and her Ma, of whom he had a very clear idea. He used to wax violent, and his imagination would run riot with the fantastic visions of success he conjured up. Who were the "top-knots" that they should have an easy, pleasant time in the country while he was left to stew in London? Hetty began genuinely to admire him, and her flattery was no longer empty. There was some sustenance in it. "O--oh!" she used to say. "You'll get on. There's no doubt about that. You'll have a big stoodio and the nobs will come up in their motor-cars, and you'll be able to paint what you like then." "You're a liar," he would reply. "I shall always paint what I like. I never do anything else, and never will. Once paint for the fools and you have to do it always, because you become a fool yourself." * * * * *