The car rolled through the streets which had been the scene of Mendel's happy rambles, but being carried through them in such magnificence made him feel helpless, a victim to something stronger than his own will and that he had always detested. He was being taken away from his mother and from Mitchell, and he knew whither motor-cars were driven. All roads ended in Sir Julius, who could sit and look at pictures without a word. Everything went spinning past him. This was going too fast, too fast, and he would be exhausted before he had really known his purpose. Maurice Birnbaum's exciting, patronizing tones, chattering on exasperatingly, infuriated him, until he felt like stabbing him in his already dropping stomach. What could a fat man like that have to do with art? How could so fat a man drive down to the wretched poverty in Whitechapel and not feel ashamed? But in spite of himself and his confused emotions Mendel enjoyed the drive, which showed him more of London than the narrowed area he frequented: more to conquer, more to know; shops, strange ugly buildings, polite, mincing people, women like dolls, men like marionettes, wide streets and plane-trees, the gardens and squares of the polite Southwest. Often there were Georgian houses like that in which his family lived, but so neat and trim and newly painted that they looked like doll's-houses, proper places for the dolls and the marionettes. . . . And it was exhilarating to be in the heart of the roaring traffic, bearing down upon scarlet buses, and swift darting taxi-cabs and motor-cars as rich as Maurice Birnbaum's. Out of the traffic they turned suddenly into a quiet street of dead houses and vast gloomy piles of flats. Outside a house more gloomy than the rest they stopped. Maurice got out fussily, told Mendel to be careful how he lifted his parcel out, fussed his way into the house through a dark, luxuriously furnished hall, and into a vast studio where there was a group of fashionably dressed women taking tea with Sir William and exclaiming about the beauties of a portrait that stood on the easel. Maurice stood awkwardly outside the circle and muttered apologies, while Mendel felt utterly and crushingly foreign to the atmosphere of the place. He knew how these people would regard him. They would stare at him with a cold interest not unmingled with horror, and he would be conscious of bearing the marks of the place he came from, of smelling of the gutter. Against that separation even art was powerless. And what had his work to do with this huge, hard, brilliant portrait on the easel? If they admired that they would never look at his dark little pictures.