I'm waiting for. But you see I don't wait to begin
work: you can't conceive what a great fellow I'm going to be. The seed
of immortality has sprouted within me."

"Only a fungoid growth, I dare say--a growing disease in the lungs,"
said Deronda, accustomed to treat Hans in brotherly fashion. He was
walking toward some drawings propped on the ledge of his bookcases;
five rapidly-sketched heads--different aspects of the same face. He
stood at a convenient distance from them, without making any remark.
Hans, too, was silent for a minute, took up his palette and began
touching the picture on his easel.

"What do you think of them?" he said at last.

"The full face looks too massive; otherwise the likenesses are good,"
said Deronda, more coldly than was usual with him.

"No, it is not too massive," said Hans, decisively. "I have noted that.
There is always a little surprise when one passes from the profile to
the full face. But I shall enlarge her scale for Berenice. I am making
a Berenice series--look at the sketches along there--and now I think of
it, you are just the model I want for the Agrippa." Hans, still with
pencil and palette in hand, had moved to Deronda's side while he said
this, but he added hastily, as if conscious of a mistake, "No, no, I
forgot; you don't like sitting for your portrait, confound you!
However, I've picked up a capital Titus. There are to be five in the
series. The first is Berenice clasping the knees of Gessius Florus and
beseeching him to spare her people; I've got that on the easel. Then,
this, where she is standing on the Xystus with Agrippa, entreating the
people not to injure themselves by resistance."

"Agrippa's legs will never do," said Deronda.

"The legs are good realistically," said Hans, his face creasing drolly;
"public men are often shaky about the legs--' Their legs, the emblem of
their various thought,' as somebody says in the 'Rehearsal.'"

"But these are as impossible as the legs of Raphael's Alcibiades," said
Deronda.

"Then they are good ideally," said Hans. "Agrippa's legs were possibly
bad; I idealize that and make them impossibly bad. Art, my Eugenius,
must intensify. But never mind the legs now: the third sketch in the
series is Berenice exulting in the prospects of being Empress of Rome,
when the news has come that Vespasian is declared Emperor and her lover
Titus his successor."

"You must put a scroll in her mouth, else people will not understand
that. Yo