The men now entered Ritter's real workshop. Here there were pieces very different in spirit. While the large figures for the Chicago Exposition showed traces of commercialism, here everything was thoroughly artistic. A companion piece in clay to the bas-relief in the club-house, a group of singing girls not yet completed, was standing on a heavy scaffolding. It showed the same noble qualities that Frederick had observed in the relief of the singing boys. Had these works been displayed in Germany, they would undoubtedly have been epoch-making. A bust of an old woman had some of the traits of Donatello. Everything in the room testified to the facility with which the youthful master created. There was a long decorative frieze in clay, putti with goats, dancing fauns, maenads, Silenus on his donkey, a procession of bacchantic figures celebrating the vintage and reproducing all the bacchic joyousness, the drunkenness, of men and women vintagers, as they cut and trod the grapes and drank the wine. Another uncompleted work in clay was the figure of a middle-aged Neptune at a fountain, looking with a jolly smile at a huge fish in his hands. There was a completed plaster cast of St. George, frankly inspired by its glorious model, the St. George of Donatello in the National Museum in Florence. In all these works, Ritter had struck a happy medium between the Greeks and Donatello and created a style fully expressing his own personality, yet showing permissible dependence upon his predecessors. The pieces in this room were without exception meant for the country residence of an American Croesus, who had taken a tremendous fancy to the young sculptor and his work and jealously tried to keep his creations from straying into another's possession. He looked upon himself as a Medici of the nineteenth century. His marble palace in extensive grounds on Long Island had already swallowed up millions of dollars, though meant as a residence merely for himself, his wife, and his only daughter. No one but Ritter was to do the statuary and sculptural decorations for his house and garden, and he was to have free play. What commissions are given in America! Were talents as easy to create in "our country" as dollars, there would be a second Renaissance even greater than the great Italian Renaissance. Frederick was fairly intoxicated by the young man's singular good fortune. What he particularly admired was the union of success and merit. When he compared the abundance of these works, tossed off apparently as in play, and the young man's cheerful evenness of temper with his own torn, distracted existence, a feeling came upon him that he had never before had, the feeling that he was an outcast, a feeling of discouragement and helpless defeat. While the light of the candles glided over the creations of the man who had infused form and soul into the formless clay, a voice within him kept saying: