He would not surrender. It would have been so easy to slip back to fake a pictorial quality. He had only to go to the National Gallery to come out with his head buzzing with ideas and impressions. He had only to go into the street to have a thousand mental notes from which to give his work a human and dramatic quality.
He stuck to it and slaved away until he was forced to give in.
“You devil!” he said, as he shook his fist at the picture. “You empty jug!”
But there was some satisfaction in it, unfinished failure as it was, and he wanted Morrison to see it.
He wrote and asked her to come.
She and Clowes were in the country, painting, and they wired to him to come and stay with them for a week. Clowes wrote to tell him that she could put him up in the farm of which her cottage was a part.
With her letter he went racing over to see his mother.
“I’m going away,” he said, “I’m going away to the country. The Christian girl has a house in the country and I am going to stay in it.”
“You will have fresh air and new milk to make you well again,” cried Golda, scarcely able to contain her joy at seeing him once more his happy, elated, robustious self. “You will be well again, but you should have done with that nonsense about the Christian girl. A sparrow does not mate with a robin, and a cock robin is what you are.”