"You are my friend," he wrote, "my only friend. It is no more to you what I am, where or how I was born, than it is to me what you are. The soul of a man chooses his friend, and I trusted you even in my folly. You could have defended me and our friendship. You have not done so and I must live miserably without you. Good-bye. I shall not attempt again to enter a life in which my work is not sufficient recommendation. I was happy. I was not happy before. I am not happy now. I have been foolish, but I was your friend." Mitchell was irritated by this letter, but he was also moved. He valued Mendel's sincerity, which had continually jolted him out of his natural indolence. And, as he had a fine talent and a fairly strong desire to use it to the full, the friendship had profited him. It had also helped him to come to reasonable terms with that great man, his father. On the other hand he was in this difficulty, that he too had been slipping out of the quintette through his new friendship with Miss Greta Morrison and her friend, Miss Edith Clowes. Knowing Mendel's contempt for the "top-knots," he had said nothing of this matter, and had found it sometimes difficult to account for the afternoons and evenings given to the dilemma of discovering whether Miss Morrison or Miss Clowes were the love of his life. Mendel was an exacting friend, and, as he concealed nothing, expected no concealment. Mitchell, like the true Englishman he was, deplored the unpleasant complication, but left it to time, impulse, or inspiration to unravel. Impulse, in due course, came to his aid and he invented a plan. First of all he wrote a manly note to Mendel, confessing his inability to understand why he should suffer for Kessler's caddishness, and declaring that friendship could not be so lightly broken. He received no reply to this, and proceeded by taking Morrison and Clowes (as in the fashion of the Detmold they were called) to see the docks at Rotherhithe. While there he gazed from Morrison to Clowes and from Clowes to Morrison, unable to decide which he loved, for both gave him an equal contraction of the heart, and then he told them that ships had never been properly painted, never _expressed_ in form and colour; and then he added that it was clearly a man's job, and then he informed them that only a short distance away lived Mendel Kühler. "Would you like to go and see him?" he asked. "It is the queerest thing to go and see him. A filthy street, a dark house, a ramshackle staircase, and there you are--absolutely one of the finest painters the Detmold has ever turned out."