d mankind. Oh, yes, machinery has made me rich! It has given the
proletariat the privilege of wearing yellow diamonds and riding about in
flivvers. That must be admitted. But to have lived in those days when
ambition thought only in beauty! To have been the boon companions of men
like Da Vinci, Cellini, Michelangelo! Then there are the adventures of
this concrete dream of the artist. I can trace it back to the bare studio
in which it was conceived, follow its journeys, its abiding places, down
to the hour it comes to me."

Jane stared at him astonishedly. All that had been crampedly hidden in his
soul flowed into his face, warming and mellowing it, even beautifying it.
Cleigh went on:

"Where will it go when I have done my little span? What new adventures lie
in store for it? Across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence runs a gallery of
portraits: at the south end of this gallery there is or was a corner given
over to a copyist. He strikes you dumb with the cleverness of his work,
but he has only an eye and a hand--he hasn't a soul. A copy is to the
original what a dummy is to a live man, no matter how amazingly well done
the copy is. The original, the dream; nothing else satisfies the true
collector."

"I didn't know," said Jane, "that you had so much romance in you."

"Romance?" It was almost a bark.

"Why, certainly. No human being could love beauty the way you do and not
be romantic."

"Romantic!" Cleigh leaned back in his chair. "That's a new point of view
for Tungsten Cleigh. That's what my enemies call me--the hardest metal on
earth. Romantic!" He chuckled. "To hear a woman call me romantic!"

"It does not follow that to be romantic one must be sentimental. Romance
is something heroic, imaginative, big; it isn't a young man and a girl
spooning on a park bench. I myself am romantic, but nobody could possibly
call me sentimental."

"No?"

"Why, if I knew that we'd come through this without anybody getting hurt
I'd be gloriously happy. All my life I've been cooped up. For a little
while to be free! But I don't like that."

She indicated Dodge, who sat in Dennison's chair, his head bandaged, his
arm in a sling, thousands of miles from his native plains, at odds with
his environment. His lean brown jaws were set and the pupils of his blue
eyes were mere pin points. During the discussion of art, during the
reading, he had not stirred.

"You mean," said Cleigh, gravely, "that Dodge may be only the beginning?"

"