ake care of Jean! Five o'clock, he had
said. She would be a little late--as she intended to be. At half past
five she had asked Paul Valmain and a choice circle of the younger set
to drop in at 26 Rue Vanitaire, as a graceful little courtesy, so to
speak, to congratulate Jean on his triumph of the night before! The
grey eyes held a smile in which mockery and merriment were mingled.
One's defences should always be in order!

The small shoe began to tap on the floor of the car again. What a
short time--what a long time those two years had been since sleepy,
anaesthetised Bernay-sur-Mer! Jean had attracted her then because he
had been a "new" sensation--and he had attracted her ever since because
he continued to be "the" sensation. But attraction and love were quite
different, were they not? Success after success, triumph after triumph
had been his. It had been astounding, stupefying, magnificent! At
first it had been the inner circle of devotees of art, such as those
who had gone to Bernay-sur-Mer, who had hailed him; then, in furious
and bewildering sequence, Paris, then France, then Europe--and,
equally, so her letters told her, he was the rage in America. None
made comparisons--there were no comparisons to make. The man towered,
stood alone, without rival, as the greatest sculptor of the age. And,
in a sense, he had not begun. Men like old Bidelot and her father said
that, stupendous as it already was, his genius had not yet attained its
full development; that, marvellous as was the power, force and realism
of his conceptions, the exquisite beauty of his execution, there still
remained an intangible something yet to be achieved.

Myrna shrugged her pretty shoulders.

"Ah, just that _tout petit chose_!" old Bidelot called it. "So
fleeting, so evanescent, so--so--" and he would wave his arms like a
grand opera conductor. "Soul," her father called it, in his turn.
"The boy hasn't lived enough yet. He'll get it, and then--well,
there's only one word to describe it--immortal!"

Myrna made a wry grimace. What was the use of all that? What did they
want? And what rubbish! A man whose work was incomparable, that all
the world was going crazy over! And what, after all, did old Bidelot
and her father know about it, anyway? Old Bidelot, for example,
couldn't make a piece of clay resemble a doughnut, except for the hole,
if he tried for a thousand years. And as for her father--Myrna choked
a laugh.

S