mightily like her, and my reason for my going
there is over."

"Well, how about that full-length figure of her in furs and velvets,
holding a little statuette in her hands, that you used to rave about
doing? If at first you make a bas-relief, begin and begin again! There
are busts and statues, as there are odes and sonnets and curtain-raisers
and five-act tragedies."

"Yes," returned Fairfax, "there are tragedies, no doubt about it."

Fairfax, smoking, struggled with the emotions rising in him and which he
had no notion of betraying to his friend. In the corner where Dearborn
had rolled it, for he made the whole studio pretty much his own now, was
the statue Fairfax was making of his mother. It was covered with a white
cloth which took the lines and form of the head and shoulders. It stood
ghostly amongst the shadows of the room and near it, on a stool, were
Antony's sculpting tools, his broad wooden knives and a barrel of
plaster. His gaze wandered to these inanimate objects, nothing in
themselves, but which suggested and made possible and real his art--the
reason for his existence. Now, when he stopped modelling Mrs. Faversham,
he would go on with the bust of his mother. He turned his eyes to
Dearborn.

"I have been up there for five weeks; I have been entertained there like
a friend; I have eaten and drunk; I have accepted her hospitality; I
have gone with her to the plays and opera. I have pretty well lived on
her money."

"All men of the world do that," Dearborn said reasonably. "It's an
awfully nice thing for a woman to have a handsome young man whom she can
call on when she likes."

Fairfax ignored this and went on. "I have met her friends, delightful
and distinguished people, who have invited me to their houses. I have
never gone, not once, not even to see Potowski. Now I shall go up next
Sunday and finish my work, and then I'm going away."

Dearborn crossed his thin legs, his beloved knit slippers, a remnant of
his mother's affection, dangling on the toe of his foot. He made a
telescope of his manuscript and peered through it as though he saw some
illumination at the other end.

"You are not serious, Tony?"

Antony left the sofa and came over to his friend. Five weeks of
comparative comfort and comparative release from the anxiety of
existence--that is, of material existence--had changed him wonderfully.
His contact with worldly people, the entertainments of Paris, the
stimulant to his mind and sens