ssion for his
art, and that sufficed him. Out of great rough blocks of marble he
would hew the most perfect semblance of men and of women, and of
everything that seemed to him most beautiful and the most worth
preserving.

When we look now at the Venus of Milo, at the Diana of Versailles, and
at the Apollo Belvidere in the Vatican, we can imagine what were the
greater things that the sculptor of Cyprus freed from the dead blocks
of marble. One day as he chipped and chiselled there came to him,
like the rough sketch of a great picture, the semblance of a woman.
How it came he knew not. Only he knew that in that great mass of pure
white stone there seemed to be imprisoned the exquisite image of a
woman, a woman that he must set free. Slowly, gradually, the woman
came. Soon he knew that she was the most beautiful thing that his art
had ever wrought. All that he had ever thought that a woman _should_
be, this woman was. Her form and features were all most perfect, and
so perfect were they, that he felt very sure that, had she been a
woman indeed, most perfect would have been the soul within. For her he
worked as he had never worked before. There came, at last, a day when
he felt that another touch would be insult to the exquisite thing he
had created. He laid his chisel aside and sat down to gaze at the
Perfect Woman. She seemed to gaze back at him. Her parted lips were
ready to speak--to smile. Her hands were held out to hold his hands.
Then Pygmalion covered his eyes. He, the hater of women, loved a
woman--a woman of chilly marble. The women he had scorned were
avenged.

[Illustration: THEN PYGMALION COVERED HIS EYES]

Day by day his passion for the woman of his own creation grew and
grew. His hands no longer wielded the chisel. They grew idle. He would
stand under the great pines and gaze across the sapphire-blue sea, and
dream strange dreams of a marble woman who walked across the waves
with arms outstretched, with smiling lips, and who became a woman of
warm flesh and blood when her bare feet touched the yellow sand, and
the bright sun of Cyprus touched her marble hair and turned it into
hair of living gold. Then he would hasten back to his studio to find
the miracle still unaccomplished, and would passionately kiss the
little cold hands, and lay beside the little cold feet the presents he
knew that young girls loved--bright shells and exquisite precious
stones, gorgeous-hued birds and fragrant flowers, shining amb