first I thought she had
been at John the Baptist and had chosen the moment when his head lay
in the charger ready for the dancing girl to take to her mother.
Fortunately I looked at it carefully before speaking. I saw that it was
Tim Gorman's head.

"He sat to me," said Mrs. Ascher, "and by degrees I came to know him
very well. One does, one cannot help it, talking to a person every day
and watching, always watching. Do you think----?"

"I think it's wonderful," I said.

This time I spoke with real and entire conviction. I am no expert judge
of anything in the world except perhaps a horse or a bottle of claret,
but I was impressed by this piece of Mrs. Ascher's work. Tim Gorman's
fine eyes were the only things about him which struck me as noticeable.
No artist can model eyes in clay. But Mrs. Ascher had got all that I saw
in his eyes into the head before me--all and a great deal more. She had
somehow succeeded in making the lips, the nostrils, the forehead, the
cheek-bones, express the fact that Tim Gorman is an idealist, a dreamer
of fine dreams and at the same time innocent as a child which looks out
at the world with wonder. I do not know how the woman did it. I should
not have supposed her capable of even seeing what she had expressed in
her clay, but there it was.

"You really like it?"

She spoke with a curious note of humility in her voice. My impulse was
to say that I liked her, for the first time saw the real good in her;
but I could not say that.

"Like it!" I said. "It isn't for me to like or dislike it. I don't know
anything about those things. I am not capable of judging. But this seems
to me to be really great."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Ascher, "and this time you are sincere."

She looked at me quite gravely as she spoke. Then a smile slowly
broadened her mouth.

"That's not the way you spoke of poor Psyche's aspiration," she said,
"you were laughing at me then."

A cold sweat broke out on my forehead. The woman had understood every
word I said to her, understood what I meant as well as what I wanted to
convey to her, two very different things. She was immensely more clever
than I suspected or could have guessed.

"Mrs. Ascher," I said, "I beg your pardon."

"You were quite right," she said. "That other thing isn't Psyche. It's
just a silly little girl, the model---- There wasn't anything about her
that I could see, nothing but just a pretty body."

So she dismissed my apology and turned to Tim Go