She darted a mischievous glance at Mendel, who started under it as though he had been stung. He was horrified at the depth of his dislike of her, and he remembered with disgust her full, coarse bosom exposed as she lay in her calculated swoon. . . . How good it had been while she was gone with that fool Thompson, who suited her so perfectly, that chattering ape, with his talk of Van Gogh and Gauguin and “abstract art,” who stood now coveting her with shining eyes and fatuously smiling lips.
“I’m not good enough for some people,” she said. “When I come into the room there is silence.”
“Oh, shut up!” said Logan. “Let’s go and have dinner and get back to Paris. I’m sick of this cardboard place, where there is nothing but pleasure.”
They had an excellent dinner, during which Oliver never stopped chattering and Mendel never once opened his lips. His thoughts were away in England, in his studio with his work, and in the country with Morrison, and he struggled to bring them together in his mind. How could Logan love Oliver and keep her apart from his work? Two such passions must infallibly seek each other out and come to grips. They must come together or be flung violently apart. . . . Passions were to him as real as persons; they had individualities, needs, desires; they were entities insisting upon their right to existence; they must express themselves, must make their impression upon the circumambient world.
He became critical of Logan, though he hated to be so. Logan stood to him for adventure and freedom, independence and courage. It was incomprehensible to him that Logan should take Oliver seriously. She was the woman for a holiday, for a wild outburst of lawlessness, not for the morning and the evening and the day between.
“Oh, do cheer up, Kühler! You are like a death’s-head at a feast.”
He looked at her with a piercing glance which silenced her. No: she was no holiday woman. She was the woman for a drab, drudging life, with no other colour or joy in it than her own animal warmth. She was like Rosa, made for just such a dreary, simple, devoted fool as Issy. What could she do with a strong passion? She could only absorb it like a sponge, and nothing could kindle her. Just a drab; just a sponge.
Thinking so, his dislike of her grew into a hatred so passionate that he desired to know more of her, to watch her, to beget a clear idea of her. He went and sat by her side and teased her, while she teased him and told him he was the prettiest boy she had ever seen.
“That night in the Tube I thought you were the prettiest boy I ever saw, and I was quite disappointed when Logan came to speak to me instead of you.”
“I would never have taken you from the shop,” he said. “I would have taken you to my studio, and perhaps I would have painted you, but I would have sent you back to the shop.”