till
you see her!"

The train rounded the curve and, leaving behind the strange looking
theatre, surely a hieratic symbol of Wagner's power, entered the station
full of gabbling, curious people--Bayreuth at last.

II

The atelier was on the ground floor at the end of a German garden full
of angular desolations. It was a large, bare, dusty apartment, the glare
of the August sun tempered by green shades nearly obscuring the big
window facing the north. A young woman sat high on a revolving platform.
She was very fat. As the sculptor fixed her with his slow glance he saw
that her head, a pretty head, was too small for her monstrous bulk; her
profile, pure Greek, the eyes ox-like, the cups full of feeling, with
heavy accents beneath them. Her face, almost slim, had planes eloquent
with surface meanings upon the cheeks and chin, while the mouth, sweet
for a large woman, revealed amiability quite in accord with the
expression of the eyes. These were the glory of her countenance, these
and her resonant black hair. Isolate this head from the shoulders, from
all the gross connotations of the frame, and the trick would be done. So
thought the sculptor, as the problem posed itself clearly; then he saw
her figure and doubted.

"I _am_ hopeless, am I not, Herr Arthmann?" Her voice was so frankly
appealing, so rich in comic intention, that he sat down and laughed. She
eagerly joined in: "And yet my waist is not so large as Mitwindt's. We
always call her Bagpipes. She is absurd. And such a chest--! Why, I'm a
mere child. Anyhow, all Germans like big singers, and all the German
Wagner singers are big women, are they not, Herr Arthmann? There was
Alboni and Parepa-Rosa--I know they were not Wagner singers; but they
were awful all the same--and just look at the Schnorrs, Materna, Rosa
Sucher, poor Klafsky and--"

"My dear young friend," interrupted the sculptor as he took up a pointer
and approached a miniature head in clay which stood upon a stand, "my
dear"--he did not say "friend" the second time--"I remarked nothing
about your figure being too large for the stage. I was trying to get it
into harmony with your magnificent shoulders and antique head. That's
all." His intonation was caressing, the speech of a cultivated man, and
his accent slightly Scandinavian; at times his voice seemed to her as
sweetly staccato as a mandolin. He gazed with all his vibrating artistic
soul into the girl's humid blue eyes; half frightened she lo