“She says you hate her,” he said.
“I?” answered Mendel. “No. I. . . . What can make her say that? Because I didn’t dance with her? I had Jessie. You ought to have danced with her.”
“I’m glad she didn’t dance. It might make her break out. Women are very queer things. You never know where they will break out. . . . You make love to them, touch a spring in them, and God knows where it may lead you. . . . You’re not in love with that mop-haired girl, are you?”
“What if I am?”
“She’s just a doll-faced miss. You’re taken with the type because you’re unused to it. For God’s sake don’t take it seriously. You’re much too good to waste yourself on women. She’ll drive you mad with purity and chivalrous devotion and all the other schoolgirl twaddle. Leave all that to the schoolboy English. It’s all they’re good for. They’ve bred it on purpose to be the mother of more schoolboys. It is the basis of the British Empire. But what is the British Empire to you or any artist? Nothing.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Mendel.
“She won’t marry you,” said Logan. “She won’t live with you. She’ll give you nothing. She’ll madden you with her conceited stupidity and wreck your work. . . . What you want is what every decent man wants—to take a woman and keep her in her place, so that she can’t interfere with him. That’s what I’ve done, and it’s made a man of me, but I’m not going to let her know it. She’d be crowing like an old hen that has laid an egg. . . . No farmyard life for me, thanks.”
Oliver bawled for her tea and Logan hastened to make it, and disappeared into the bedroom.
Mendel got up and dressed, feeling eager for the day. The sun shone in through the window and filled the room with a dusty glow, making even the shabby bareness of the place seem charming.
“It is a good day,” he said to himself. “I shall work to-day.” And he was annoyed at not having his canvas at hand.