I want to sell."

She looked at him superbly. "Well, do you?"

He embraced his bleak walls in a circular gesture. "Judge for yourself!"

"Ah, but it's splendidly furnished!"

"With rejected pictures, you mean?"

"With ideals!" she exclaimed in a tone caught from her brother, and
which would have been irritating to Stanwell if it had not been moving.

He gave a slight shrug and took up his hat; but she interposed to say
that if it didn't make any difference she would prefer to have him go
and sit with poor Caspar, while she ran for the doctor and did some
household errands by the way. Stanwell divined in her request the need
for a brief respite from Caspar, and though he shivered at the thought
of her facing the cold in the scant jacket which had been her only wear
since he had known her, he let her go without a protest, and betook
himself to Arran's studio.

He found the little sculptor dressed and roaming fretfully about the
melancholy room in which he and his plastic off-spring lodged together.
In one corner, where Kate's chair and work-table stood, a scrupulous
order prevailed; but the rest of the apartment had the dreary
untidiness, the damp grey look, which the worker in clay usually
creates about him. In the centre of this desert stood the shrouded
image of Caspar's disappointment: the colossal rejected group as to
which his friends could seldom remember whether it represented Jove
hurling a Titan from Olympus or Science Subjugating Religion. Caspar
was the sworn foe of religion, which he appeared to regard as
indirectly connected with his inability to sell his statues.

The sculptor was too ill to work, and Stanwell's appearance loosed the
pent-up springs of his talk.

"Hullo! What are you doing here? I thought Kate had gone over to sit to
you. She wanted a little fresh air? I should say enough of it came in
through these windows. How like a woman, when she's agreed to do a
certain thing, to make up her mind at once that she's got to do
another! They don't call it caprice--it's always duty: that's the
humour of it. I'll be bound Kate alleged a pressing engagement. Sorry
she should waste your time so, my dear fellow. Here am I with plenty of
it to burn--look at my hand shake; I can't do a thing! Well, luckily
nobody wants me to--posterity may suffer, but the present generation
isn't worrying. The present generation wants to be carved in
sugar-candy, or painted in maple syrup. It doesn't want to be told