“There’s not much plunder in my family,” said Mendel.
After breakfast he declared that he must go, and Logan announced that he would walk with him to enjoy the lovely sunny day. Oliver wanted to come too, but he told her to stay where she was, and he left her in tears.
“She’s got a bad habit of crying,” he said, “and she must be broken of it. She cries if I don’t speak to her for an hour. She cries if I go out without telling her where I am going. She cries if I curse and swear over my work, and if I am pleased with it she cries because I am never so happy with her. . . . I feel like hitting her sometimes, but it isn’t her fault. She hasn’t settled down to it yet. She says I don’t love her when she knows she never expected to be loved so much. And she can’t get used to it.”
“Why don’t you paint her crying?” asked Mendel maliciously.
“By Jove! I will,” cried Logan. “Damned interesting drawing, with her eyes all puckered up. . . . But it’s a shame on a day like this to be out of temper with anything. Lord! How women do spoil the universe, to be sure! Do they give us anything to justify the mess they make of it? . . . Women and shopkeepers. I don’t see why one should have any mercy on either of them. I have no compunction in stealing anything I want. Shopkeepers steal from the public all the little halfpennies and farthings of extra profit they exact.”
He led Mendel into a picture shop and asked for a reproduction of a picture by Van Tromp, and when the girl retired upstairs to ask about that non-existent artist, he turned over the albums and helped himself to half a dozen reproductions, rolled them up, and put them in his pocket. When the girl came down and said they were out of Van Tromps, he said:—
“I’m sorry. Very sorry to trouble you.”
When they were out of the shop he chuckled, and was as elated over his success as Mr. Kuit had been over his exploits.
“Oh! I should be an artist in anything I did,” he said. “I don’t wonder thieves can’t go straight once they get on the lay. If I weren’t a painter I should be a criminal.”
He walked with Mendel as far as Gray’s Inn, and there left him, saying he had another picture-buying flat to go and see, and after that he must pay a visit to Uncle Cluny and keep him up to the mark. He was in fine fettle, and went off singing at the top of his voice.