“I didn’t want to come,” replied she, “but something Mitchell said made me want to come.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me about Kessler, and I thought it was a shame. I thought it was a horrible shame that you should be treated like that, as if anything mattered but your work.”
Her voice rather irritated him. Her accent was rather mincing and precise, and between her sentences she gave a little gasp which he took for an affectation.
“Why did Mitchell tell you that?”
“He tells me a great deal about you, and he was really upset by your letter.”
“Was he? Was he?”
Mendel had no thought but for Mitchell. He longed to go to him, to embrace him, to tell him that all was different now. He blurted it all out to the girl.
“We were so happy, the four of us together. Every evening we met and we were like kings. Everything that we wanted to do we did. We had money and success and all such foolish things, and we worked hard, all of us. There were not in London four young men like us, and I was free of the terrible people who wanted to turn me into an ordinary successful painter—a portrait painter. I tell you, I have never had a commission in my life that was not a failure. I only wanted to be young and to work, for I had never been young before. And then suddenly, out of nothing, my friends turned on me and told me I was a Jew and uneducated, and ought to treat them with more respect. Why? The Jews are good people, and what do I want with education? Can books teach me how to paint? I tell you the Jews are good people.”
Tea was brought up on a lacquer tray—bread, jam, and cake. They were both hungry and fell to with a will, hardly speaking at all.