“I don’t know. She just said it suddenly. Like she says things. The doctors are all awfully fond of him.”
“Why are they fond of him?”
“He is extraordinary. He has given up his poster work and does lightning silhouettes, outlines of heads, at five shillings each at some gardens somewhere. Sometimes he makes five pounds an evening at it.”
“So you don’t go to Ruscino’s every evening?”
“He had a few weeks of being awfully poor. One day he had only eightpence in the world. Of course he was having all his meals at Tansley Street. But that evening he found out that I had nothing at all. I had been telling him about my meal arrangements. I always pay Mrs. Bailey at the time for my shilling dinners and when I can’t afford them I get a fourpenny meal at a Y.W.C.A. He made me take his eightpence. The next day he walked I found afterwards, all the way to South Kensington in the grilling heat to see a man about the silhouettes.”
“What a little brick.”
“He is like that to everybody. And always so....”
“So what?”
“Oh, I can’t express him. But he’s a Jew, you know, a Spanish Jew. Isn’t it extraordinary?”
“Well really Miriam I can’t see that there is anything extraordinary about a man’s being a Spanish Jew if he wants to?”