nd. On this point his mind was made up, and the money he was going
to receive for this statue was the money that was going to take him
away. He had had enough of a country where there had never been any
sculpture or any painting, nor any architecture to signify. They were
talking about reviving the Gothic, but Rodney did not believe in their
resurrections or in their renaissance or in their anything. "The Gael
has had his day. The Gael is passing." Only the night before he and
Harding had had a long talk about the Gael, and he had told Harding
that he had given up the School of Art, that he was leaving Ireland,
and Harding had thought that this was an extreme step, but Rodney had
said that he did not want to die, that no one wanted to die less than
he did, but he thought he would sooner die than go on teaching. He had
made some reputation and had orders that would carry him on for some
years, and he was going where he could execute them, to where there
were models, to where there was art, to where there was the joy of
life, out of a damp religious atmosphere in which nothing flourished
but the religious vocation.

"Good Heavens! How happy I was yesterday, full of hope and happiness,
my statue finished, and I had arranged to meet Harding in Rome. The
blow had fallen in the night. Who had done this? Who had destroyed it?"

He fell into a chair, and sat helpless like his own lay figure. He sat
there like one on whom some stupor had fallen, and he was as white as
one of the casts; the charwoman had never seen anyone give way like
that before, and she withdrew very quietly.

In a little while he got up and mechanically kicked the broken pieces
of plaster aside. The charwoman was right, they had broken his sleeping
girl: that did not matter much, but the beautiful slenderness, the
grace he had caught from Lucy's figure--those slendernesses, those
flowing rhythms, all these were gone; the lovely knees were ugly clay.
Yes, there was the ruin, the ignoble ruin, and he could not believe in
it; he still hoped he would wake and find he had been dreaming, so
difficult is it to believe that the living have turned to clay.

In front of him there was the cheval glass, and overcome though he was
by misfortune he noticed that he was a small, pale, wiry, and very dark
little man, with a large bony forehead. He had seen, strangely enough,
such a bumpy forehead, and such narrow eyes in a Florentine bust, and
it was some satisfaction to h