“Overseen,” Logan repeated, with an obvious pleasure in plucking out the weeds from their friendship, in the fair promise of which he found peace and joy. “That was the trouble. It couldn’t go on. . . . City life, I think. Too much for us. Things too much our own way. . . . Egoism. . . .”
“I know that I am feeling my way towards something and that it is no good forcing it,” said Mendel.
An acute attack of pain seized Logan, and he closed his eyes and was silent for a long time, with his brows knit in a kind of impatient boredom at having to submit to such a thing as pain.
“They’ve been very good to me,” he said. “Given me everything as if I were really ill.”
He sank back into pain again.
Mendel looked across at the policeman with a feeling of irritation that he should be there, a typical figure of the absurd chaotic life which had fallen away, a symbol of the factitious pretence of order which could only deceive a child.
“Can’t you leave me alone with him?” he whispered.
The policeman shook his head.
“No, sir.”