if you only knew, he wears that jam-pot round his neck to hide where
his head's come off."

Presently the front door slammed.

Chapter XXII: _The Unfinished Statue_

Maurice, on being informed of the decisive step which Jenny had taken,
asked her why she had not taken the more decisive step of avowing his
protection.

"Because I don't want to. Not yet. I can't explain why. But I don't. Oh,
Maurice, don't go on asking me any more."

"It's nothing to do with your people. Because you evidently don't mind
hurting their feelings in another way."

"Going to live at Ireen's isn't the same as living with you."

"You needn't live with me openly. Nobody wants you to do that. Only----"

"It's not a bit of good your going on," she interrupted. "I've told you
I will one day."

"One day," he sighed.

It was a fine February that year, coming in with a stir of spring.
Maurice felt in accord with the season's impulse, and became possessed
with the ambition to create a work of art. He suggested that Jenny
should come daily to the studio and sit for his statue of The Tired
Dancer.

"I'm sure my real vocation is plastic," he declared. "I can write and I
can play, but neither better than a lot of other people. With sculpture
it's different. To begin with, there isn't such competition. It's the
least general of the arts, although in another sense it's the most
universal. Again, it's an art that we seem to have lost. Yet by every
rule of social history, it is the art with which the present stage of
evolution should be most occupied. In this era of noise and tear the
splendid quiescence of great sculpture should provoke every creative
mind. I have the plastic impulse, but so far I've been content to
fritter it away in bits and pieces of heads and arms and hands. I must
finish something; make something."

Jenny was content to sit watching him through blue wreaths of cigarette
smoke. She found a sensuous delight in seeing him happy and hearing the
flow of his excited talk.

"Now I must mold you, Jenny," he went on, pacing up and down in the
midst of the retinue of resolutions and intentions. "By gad! I'm
thrilled by the thought of it. To possess you in virgin wax, to mold
your delicious shape with my own hands, to see you taking form at my
compelling touch. By gad! I'm thrilled by it. What's a lyric after that?
I could pour my heart out in every meter imaginable, but I should never
give anything more than myself to the w