III.

Arnus Beaton's studio looked at first glance like many other painters'
studios. A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light;
casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil
and water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table,
with paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed
comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk
trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with
its head on one side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress
dropped before it; dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished
floor; canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with
costumes: these features one might notice anywhere. But, besides, there
was a bookcase with an unusual number of books in it, and there was an
open colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned,
with foreign periodicals--French and English--littering its leaf, and
some pages of manuscript scattered among them. Above all, there was
a sculptor's revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was
modelling, with an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay
and on the head of the old man who sat on the platform beside it.

Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to
advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they
have more than one. But they are apparently immensely interested as well
as distracted by them. When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed,
up to a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper
expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point,
he would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist, and
supremely a colorist. At the certain point in either art he was apt to
break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other.
In these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very
striking, very original, very chic, very everything but habitable. It
was in this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had
at first approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory
of architecture. But it had grown in his respect till he maintained
that the accessory business ought to be all the other way: that temples
should be raised to enshrine statues, not statues made to ornament
temples; that was putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance.
This was whe