orld. But if I make a glorious
statue of you, I give you--you forever and ever for men to gaze at and
love and desire. By gad! I'm thrilled by the thought of it. There's
objective art. Ha! Poor old poets with their words. Where are they? You
can't dig your nails into a word. By Jove, the Nereids in the British
Museum. You remember those Nereids, darling?"

Jenny looked blank.

"Yes, you do. You said how much you liked them. You must remember them,
so light and airy that they seem more like clouds or blowballs than
solid marble."

"I think _all_ the statues we saw was very light and airy, if it comes
to that," said Jenny.

Maurice gave up pacing round the room and flung himself into a chair to
discuss details of the conception.

"Of course, I'd like you to be dressed as a Columbine: and yet, I don't
know, it's rather obvious."

"I could wear my practice dress."

"What's that like?"

"I've got two or three. Only the nicest is my gray tarlington."

"Eh?"

"You know, very frilly musling. Just like a ballet skirt, only you
needn't wear tights."

"I didn't hear what you said. I know, tarlatan. Nice frizzy stuff. That
sounds good. And it won't matter crumpling it?"

"Of course not."

"Because you see I want you to be lying on a pile of rugs and cushions
just as if you'd been dancing hard and had fallen asleep where you sank
down."

So, in the time of celandines and snowdrops, Jenny would come to the
studio every day; and when they had lunched together intimately and
delightfully, she would go downstairs to change her frock, while Maurice
arranged her resting-place.

The dove-gray tarlatan skirt, resilient like the hair-spring of a watch,
suited the poise of Jenny's figure. She wore gray silk stockings clocked
with vivid pink, a _crepe de Chine_ blouse the color of mist, and round
her head a fillet of rosy velvet. Altogether, she looked an Ariel woven
magically from the smoke of London. Once or twice she actually fell fast
asleep among the rugs; but generally she lay in a dream, just conscious
of the flow of Maurice's comments and rhapsodies.

"It's an extraordinary thing," he began on one occasion. "But as I sit
here fashioning your body out of wax, you yourself become every moment
more and more of a spirit. I've a queer fancy working in my brain all
the time that this is really you, here under my hands. I suppose it's
the perpetual concentration on one object that puts everything else out
of proportion.