"If that is your Christian love," he said to himself, "I will have none of it."
He studied the Madonnas in the National Gallery, and they confirmed his impression of the weakness of Christian love, that left out the strong, vital love of a man for a woman, of a woman for a man. He characterized it as womanish, and could not see that the ideal had served to save women from male tyranny. Moreover, most of the pictures struck him as shockingly bad, which confirmed his notion that the ideal that inspired them was rotten.
He could not test his ideas by his experience with Morrison, for he dared not think of her at all. When his mother spoke of her, it had been like a sharp knife through his heart. . . . Yes. _That_ was love, and it could not be bothered with the idea of children. If they came, it would make room for them, but it was not going to be robbed by them. Its object was the woman, and it detested any idea that got between it and her. . . . Yet when this love for Morrison stood between himself and his love for art, he hated her almost as violently. Sometimes he thought that he would kill her, because she stood there smiling. She was always smiling. She could be happy; she could so easily be happy. . . .
Logan came to fetch him to go to the exhibition.
"I don't want to go to the exhibition. I don't want to see other people's pictures. I want to paint my own."
"Oh! That's always the matter with everybody."
Logan roared with laughter, and he went on laughing because he enjoyed it. It was long since he had laughed so easily.
"Most of them do," he said. "Even if they've hated having them."
"They don't," said Mendel. "It's instinct just to gloat over them, just as one gloats over a picture one has just finished, however bad it may be. It has cost you something, and there is something to show for it. It is quite blind and stupid, like an animal. It is like lust. It is neither true nor false. It just _is_, chaotic and half-created. Love is a human thing. Love is the most human thing there is. When a clerk marries a girl because he wants a woman, I don't call that love. He is only making himself comfortable. There is a little more dirt in the world, that is all."
"Please listen," said Mendel. "I have been nearly mad this last fortnight, ever since the party. All my life seems to have broken its way into my mind, and I don't know when I shall be able to get it out again. It is very important that I should talk, and I have no one really to talk to except you. I am very lonely because I am a Jew and people do not understand me, or rather they think they understand me because I am a Jew. They think all Jews are the same. It is very rarely that I feel I am accepted as a man with thoughts, feelings, tears, laughter, tastes, bowels, senses like any other man."