“And some day,” she went on, “I want to take you down into the country.”
He began to suspect her of wanting to meddle with his work.
“I don’t want the country,” he rapped out. “I am a Londoner. All the life I care about is in the streets and in the houses, in the restaurants and the shops, and the costers’ barrows and the cinemas and the picture galleries. That is why I live here, because I love the coarse, thrumming vitality all round me.”
“But I want the country,” she said, “and you should know the life I love.”
For a moment it seemed to him that the key to the mystery she talked of was in his hands. He clutched at it and it evaded him, but his idolatry of her was shaken, and he began dimly to see her as a creature like himself, with feelings, thoughts, desires, and a will. There was no doubt at all about the will, and he had to recognize it.
[VIII
OLIVER]
THEN began a period of quiet, happy friendship for them both. Mendel was astonishingly amenable to many of her disciplinary suggestions and allowed her to cut his hair (though not without thinking of Delilah), and when she ordered him to get some new clothes he went off obediently to a friend of Issy’s and had a suit made—West End style at East End prices.
“You will soon have me looking like a Public School gentleman,” he said.
“Never!” she replied. “You will never move like one—thank goodness.”