“Oh yes. I remember. You know Maurice Birnbaum?”
“No.”
“Eh? . . . What do you think of these? Lovely, eh? Bought them in India. You should go there. You don’t know what sunlight is until you’ve been there—to the East. Ah, the East! Fills you with sunlight, opens your eyes to colour. . . . Persian prints! What do you think of these?”
He showed Mendel a whole series of exquisite things which moved him so profoundly that he forgot altogether why he had come and began to stammer out his rapture, a condition of delight to which Mr. Froitzheim was so unaccustomed that he stepped back and stared at his visitor. There was a glow in the boy’s face which gave it a seraphic expression. Mr. Froitzheim tiptoed to the door and called, “Edith! Edith!” And his wife came rustling in. She was a thin little woman with a friendly smile and an air of being only too amiable for a world that needed sadly little of the kindness with which she was bursting. They stood by the door and talked in whispers, and Mendel was brought back to earth by hearing her say, “Poor child!” He knew she meant himself, and his inclination was to fly from the room, but they barred the door. She came undulating towards him, and she seemed to him terrifyingly beautiful, the most lovely lady he had ever seen. He thought Mr. Froitzheim must be a very wonderful artist to have such a studio, such a house, and such a woman to live with him.
Mrs. Froitzheim made him sit down and drew his attention to a bowl of flowers—tulips and daffodils. Mendel touched them with his fingers, lovingly caressed the fleshy petals of a tulip. Mrs. Froitzheim went over to her husband and whispered to him, who said:—
“Yes. Yes. It is true. He responds to beauty like a flower to the sun.”
In the centre of the studio was a large picture nearly finished of three children and a rocking-horse, cleverly and realistically painted. Mendel looked at it enviously, with a sinking in the pit of his stomach, partly because he could not like it, and partly because he felt how impossible it would be for him to cover so vast a canvas.
“Like it?” said Mr. Froitzheim, wheeling it about to catch the best light.
“Yes,” said Mendel, horrified at his own insincerity and unhappy at the vague notion possessing him that the picture was too large for him, whose notion of art was concentration upon an object until by some inexplicable process it had yielded up its beauty in paint. Composing and making pictures he could not understand.