She was beautifully made, but she looked so foolish with her anxiety to please him that he could take hardly any interest in her, and he was distressed, too, because the only background he could give her consisted of his new knavish thoughts of the wealth of London. Yet nothing could disturb it, for the background was suitable. Her white body was her offering.
“How much would I be paid?”
“A shilling an hour.”
“Do you pay that?”
“Yes.”
“If you could get me work I would sit to you for nothing.”
“I’d pay you,” he said. His generous qualities strove hard to reassert themselves, but there was something about this girl that compelled just what he was giving her—hardness for hardness, value for value. Yet she was certainly beautiful, and it was strange to him to be unable to give her the warm homage that within himself he could not help feeling.
She sat on the bed, making no move to cover herself, and said:—
“Artists are different. There was an artist once at Margate. It was him put the idea into my head. But he was very poor and not a gentleman.”
And now to Mendel she was an object of sheer astonishment. He stood and warmed his legs by the gas stove and gaped at her, sitting on his bed and chattering in her clear, hard voice of her ambitions, her dreams, the drudgery at home, while in everything she said was a flattery which he could not resist. Worst of all, he felt that he was one of a pair with her. His talent, her body, were shining offerings with which they both emerged from the depths of the despised. Entering into her spirit, he too was filled with a desire for revenge. Yet in him this desire was charged with passion, which made their present situation ridiculous. He thought of the poverty and the obscure suffering downstairs, the dragging penury to which, but for his talent, he would have been condemned. Then he imagined her as Issy had described her at Margate, lurking in the kitchen, listening behind the door as Leah spun her yarns. He could sympathize with her, and she seemed to him almost gallant.