"But Tolstoi liked bad artists!" grumbled Mendel. "And my mother does not like some of my best things. As for my father, he wants a painted bread to look as if he could eat it: never is he satisfied just to look at it. His love and my love are not the same and cannot speak to each other." "You should see more of Morrison, and then you would understand," rejoined Mitchell. Mendel felt that Mitchell was slipping away from him, and all this Christian talk of love was to him a corrosion upon his imagination and his nervous energy, blurring and distorting everything that he valued. There were many things that he hated, and yet because he hated them their interest for him was consuming. Issy's wife, for instance, and her squalling children; his father's bitter tongue; and Mitchell's odd self-importance. He repeated:-- "Tolstoi liked bad artists." "You can't settle a big man like Tolstoi just by repeating phrases about him." "I can settle him by painting good pictures," retorted Mendel. "I don't paint pictures to please people." "Then why do you paint?" "I don't know. To be an artist. Because there is a thing called art which matters to me more than all the love and all the women and all the little girls in the world." "Ah!" sighed Mitchell. "You'll soon think differently. I shall never do another stroke of work without thinking of Greta standing on Kew Bridge and looking up the river at the boats with their white sails." "Will you be quiet?" cried Mendel; "will you be quiet with your little girls and white sails?" Mitchell seemed to be slipping away from him, and he dreaded the thought of being left alone with his success, which was blowing a bulb of glass round him, so that he felt imprisoned in it, and wherever he looked could see nothing but reflections of himself, Mendel Kühler, painting his mother, and his father, and old Jews and loaves and fishes for ever and ever. While he clung to Mitchell he knew that he could not be so encased, but Mitchell demanded that he should go out with him into a world all glowing with love, with rivers of milk and honey and meadows pied with buttercups and daisies; to stand on airy bridges and gaze at innocent little girls and white sails. The contemplation of this world revolted him, and he stiffened himself against it. Better the smells and the dirt than such fantastical stuff. His gorge rose against it.