the Roman
women very beautiful?" she asked.

Rowland too, in answering, hesitated; he was looking straight at the
young girl. "On the whole, I prefer ours," he said.

She had dropped her work in her lap; her hands were crossed upon it, her
head thrown a little back. She had evidently expected a more impersonal
answer, and she was dissatisfied. For an instant she seemed inclined to
make a rejoinder, but she slowly picked up her work in silence and drew
her stitches again.

Rowland had for the second time the feeling that she judged him to be
a person of a disagreeably sophisticated tone. He noticed too that the
kitchen towel she was hemming was terribly coarse. And yet his answer
had a resonant inward echo, and he repeated to himself, "Yes, on the
whole, I prefer ours."

"Well, these models," began Mr. Striker. "You put them into an attitude,
I suppose."

"An attitude, exactly."

"And then you sit down and look at them."

"You must not sit too long. You must go at your clay and try to build up
something that looks like them."

"Well, there you are with your model in an attitude on one side,
yourself, in an attitude too, I suppose, on the other, and your pile of
clay in the middle, building up, as you say. So you pass the morning.
After that I hope you go out and take a walk, and rest from your
exertions."

"Unquestionably. But to a sculptor who loves his work there is no time
lost. Everything he looks at teaches or suggests something."

"That 's a tempting doctrine to young men with a taste for sitting by
the hour with the page unturned, watching the flies buzz, or the frost
melt on the window-pane. Our young friend, in this way, must have laid
up stores of information which I never suspected!"

"Very likely," said Rowland, with an unresentful smile, "he will prove
some day the completer artist for some of those lazy reveries."

This theory was apparently very grateful to Mrs. Hudson, who had never
had the case put for her son with such ingenious hopefulness, and found
herself disrelishing the singular situation of seeming to side against
her own flesh and blood with a lawyer whose conversational tone betrayed
the habit of cross-questioning.

"My son, then," she ventured to ask, "my son has great--what you would
call great powers?"

"To my sense, very great powers."

Poor Mrs. Hudson actually smiled, broadly, gleefully, and glanced at
Miss Garland, as if to invite her to do likewise. But the young gi