ch?" asked Balbilla.

"Yes, if I thought it successful; not if I felt it to be a failure."

"Any one who keeps a bad bust," said Balbilla, "must feel fearful lest an
undeservedly bad reputation is handed down to future generations."

"Certainly! but how then can you find courage to expose yourself for the
sixth time to a form of calumny that it is difficult to counteract?"

"Because I can have anything destroyed that I choose," laughed the spoilt
girl. "Otherwise sitting still is not much to my taste."

"That is very true," sighed Claudia. "But from you I expect something
strikingly good."

"Thank you," said Pollux, "and I will take the utmost pains to complete
something that may correspond to my own expectations of what a marble
portrait ought to be, that deserves to be preserved to posterity."

"And those expectations require--?"

Pollux considered for a moment, and then he replied:

"I have not always the right words at my command, for all that I feel as
an artist. A plastic presentiment, to satisfy its creator, must fulfil
two conditions; first it must record for posterity in forms of eternal
resemblance all that lay in the nature of the person it represents;
secondly, it must also show to posterity what the art of the time when it
was executed, was capable of."

"That is a matter of course--but you are forgetting your own share."

"My own fame you mean?"

"Certainly."

"I work for Papias and serve my art, and that is enough; meanwhile Fame
does not trouble herself about me, nor do I trouble myself about her."

"Still, you will put your name on my bust?"

"Why not?"

"You are as prudent as Cicero."

"Cicero?"

"Perhaps you would hardly know old Tullius' wise remark that the
philosophers who wrote of the vanity of writers put their names to their
books all the same."

"Oh! I have no contempt for laurels, but I will not run after a thing
which could have no value for me, unless it came unsought, and because it
was my due."

"Well and good; but your first condition could only be fulfilled in its
widest sense if you could succeed in making yourself acquainted with my
thoughts and feelings, with the whole of my inmost mind."

"I see you and talk to you," replied Pollux. Claudia laughed aloud, and
said:

"If instead of two sittings of two hours you were to talk to her for
twice as many years you would always find something new in her. Not a
week passes in which Rome does not find in her somethi