"They've spent enough," cried Mendel, "without that. I don't want their money any more. They know that. They want to keep me in their hands and to say that they made me. They? People like that! God made me, and they want to keep me all my life saying how grateful I am to them. Grateful? I am not."
He sat down and wrote to Maurice Birnbaum saying that he would not go to Italy, that he did not want any more of his commissions, and that he would not be interfered with any more. He would shortly repay every penny he had had, and he asked only to be allowed to know best what he wanted to do.
"Everything that I love is here in London, and I can only learn from what I love. I am one kind of artist and you want to turn me into another kind. You will only waste your money, and I will not let you do it."
Maurice never answered this letter and patronage and that of his friends was withdrawn.
Mendel plunged more ardently than ever into his career with Mitchell and the others, but found that they were not prepared to share or to admit the new freedom which he had begun to enjoy. The Birnbaum patronage had always to a certain extent restrained him, but now that it was shaken off he plunged madly and wildly into every kind of extravagance. He was no longer content to be the equal of the others. He wanted to lead them. He was the most successful of them all, and he wanted them all to join him in forcing art upon London. Calthrop had shown them the way, but he had unaccountably stopped short. He had many imitators, and there were even women who looked like his type, but it all ended in his personality. . . . Art was something else: something outside that, an impersonal thing, which London should be made to recognize. The pictures of Kühler, Mitchell, Weldon, and Kessler should be, as it were, only forerunners of the mighty pictures that should be painted. . . .
He was just as extreme and violent in his vices as he was in his idealism, and even Mitchell was rather upset by his pranks and caprices. It was one thing to take a shy tame genius among your acquaintance, quite another when the genius ran wild and dragged you hither and thither and with breathless haste from the vilest human company to the most dizzily soaring ideas. Weldon, who was uncommonly shrewd, had begun to see the danger of allowing Hetty Finch to arrange their affairs, and when on top of that Mendel, drunk with freedom and success, began to take charge, he thought it time to secure himself and began to withdraw from their undertakings and adventures.