When
Frederick recommended Ingigerd to her guidance, he did so because he
himself had experienced a beneficent influence from her remarks, dictated
by a beautiful intellect, and from the glance of her straight, honest,
scrutinising eyes.

"At the risk of making myself ridiculous," he said to himself, "I will go
to Ritter's studio to-morrow morning, bury my hands in the clay, and try
to reconstruct my life again from the bottom up out of moist clay."

XV

At about ten o'clock the next morning Ritter himself gave Frederick a
very glad, bright welcome to his studio, and assigned to him a small room
opening on Miss Burns's room. Miss Burns proposed that he begin by
copying a plaster-cast of the arm of the Saxon athlete.

Frederick for the first time handled the moist clay fraught with so much
significance, the clay out of which the gods made man and man in turn has
made gods. As a result of the hours he had spent in Rome with sculptor
friends, watching them work and observing each movement of their fingers,
he accomplished his task with great ease, to his own astonishment and
Miss Burns's admiration. His anatomical knowledge and medical experience
also stood him in good stead. Shortly before completing his course as a
medical student, he had for a time entertained the idea of publishing
an anatomy for sculptors, and with this in view had made a number of
drawings which won the favour of real connoisseurs.

After Frederick had worked feverishly with his shirt sleeves rolled up
for three hours, the athlete's muscular arm began to take shape clearly,
and he felt a sense of satisfaction wholly novel to him. In working he
completely forgot who he was, and where he was. When Willy Snyders came
in, as he usually did on his way from his work to luncheon for the
purpose of saying "how-do-you-do" to Bonifacius Ritter and art, it seemed
to Frederick that he had been awakened from a dream and called back to a
strange life.

"I am sorry to have to leave work and go to lunch. Lunch is really a very
disturbing thing," he confessed.

When Ritter entered, they all laughed heartily at his genuine passion for
sculpture.

"When I return to Europe," he said, "I must immediately make portraits of
my three children."

Miss Burns and Willy Snyders had actually made Frederick proud by their
praise, though in Ritter's presence they turned silent awaiting the
master's verdict.

"You must certainly have modelled in clay before,"