“He had a few weeks of being awfully poor. One day he had only eightpence in the world. Of course he was having all his meals at Tansley Street. But that evening he found out that I had nothing at all. I had been telling him about my meal arrangements. I always pay Mrs. Bailey at the time for my shilling dinners and when I can’t afford them I get a fourpenny meal at a Y.W.C.A. He made me take his eightpence. The next day he walked I found afterwards, all the way to South Kensington in the grilling heat to see a man about the silhouettes.”
“What a little brick.”
“He is like that to everybody. And always so. …”
“So what?”
“Oh, I can’t express him. But he’s a Jew, you know, a Spanish Jew. Isn’t it extraordinary?”
“Well really Miriam I can’t see that there is anything extraordinary about a man’s being a Spanish Jew if he wants to?”
“I was most awfully surprised. Mrs. Bailey told me. There is some Jewish girl he has been meeting in Kensington; he drew her portrait, a special one, for her father, for five guineas, and he has engaged himself to her because he thought she had money and now finds she has not damn her, he said damn her to Mrs. Bailey, and that he has been boring himself for nothing. He is going into hospital for his gastric ulcer when the season is over and then going to disappear. He told me he never spoke to a woman more than twice; but that he is willing to marry any woman with enough money.”
“Wise man.”
“He has spoken more than twice to you.”