“I don’t know,” he replied, “but you had better not try.”
“There is one thing I’m curious about,” I said, “and that is where the ray of sunlight came from.”
“It looked like a sunbeam true enough,” he said. “I don’t know, it always comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,” he continued, smiling, “perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source from whence it came.”
I saw he was mocking, and threatened him with a mahlstick, but he only laughed and changed the subject.
“Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.”
“I saw her going to early mass,” I said, “and she looked as fresh and sweet as that lily—before you destroyed it.”
“Do you think I destroyed it?” said Boris gravely.
“Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?”
We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of the Fates . He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor’s chisel and squinting at his work.
“By the way,” he said, “I have finished pointing up that old academic Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It’s all I have ready this year, but after the success the Madonna brought me I feel ashamed to send a thing like that.”
The Madonna , an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been the sensation of last year’s Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the world would expect something better of him than that. Still, it was