ur father?" "No, he is my husband." So this
child was married, you see.

This was a Saturday. Next day Warner came to dinner and said "Go!--go
tomorrow--don't fail." He was in love with the girl, and with her
husband too, and said he believed there was merit in the statue. Pretty
crude work, maybe, but merit in it.

Patrick and I hunted up the place, next day; the girl saw us driving up,
and flew down the stairs and received me. Her quarters were the second
story of a little wooden house--another family on the ground floor. The
husband was at the machine shop, the wife kept no servant, she was there
alone. She had a little parlor, with a chair or two and a sofa; and the
artist-husband's hand was visible in a couple of plaster busts, one of
the wife, and another of a neighbor's child; visible also in a couple of
water colors of flowers and birds; an ambitious unfinished portrait
of his wife in oils: some paint decorations on the pine mantel; and an
excellent human ear, done in some plastic material at 16.

Then we went into the kitchen, and the girl flew around, with
enthusiasm, and snatched rag after rag from a tall something in the
corner, and presently there stood the clay statue, life size--a graceful
girlish creature, nude to the waist, and holding up a single garment
with one hand the expression attempted being a modified scare--she was
interrupted when about to enter the bath.

Then this young wife posed herself alongside the image and so
remained--a thing I didn't understand. But presently I did--then I said:

"O, it's you!"

"Yes," she said, "I was the model. He has no model but me. I have stood
for this many and many an hour--and you can't think how it does tire
one! But I don't mind it. He works all day at the shop; and then, nights
and Sundays he works on his statue as long as I can keep up."

She got a big chisel, to use as a lever, and between us we managed to
twist the pedestal round and round, so as to afford a view of the statue
from all points. Well, sir, it was perfectly charming, this girl's
innocence and purity---exhibiting her naked self, as it were, to a
stranger and alone, and never once dreaming that there was the slightest
indelicacy about the matter. And so there wasn't; but it will be many
along day before I run across another woman who can do the like and show
no trace of self-consciousness.

Well, then we sat down, and I took a smoke, and she told me all about
her people in Massachu