Then she knew that one of two things had happened; either he had come to the limit of his powers, and, as a child will, had grown tired of a thing in which he could make no further progress; or else he had reached an age when the mind sees fair forms which the hand cannot fashion, and in disgust at his failure he had broken up his figures, though they were better than what he had done before, because they fell short of the ideal in his mind. "Thou art tired of playing with clay, my child," she said; "come with me, and I will see if we cannot find something that will please thee better." So she kept him with her, and taught him letters, and read to him tales of the gods and heroes, till the child's eyes grew big with wonder, and she saw that all she read passed before his mind like a moving picture. She read to him from the old Greek poets, tales of bravery and might, of love and of adventure--tales, too, of cruelty and bloodshed, jealousy and hate. But whatever she read was beautiful, for the Greeks loved beauty above all things else, and clothed their thoughts in fair forms of words, so that even when they told of wickedness and wrong they left no stain of ugliness upon the mind. Pygmalion drank in eagerly all that was read to him, and because he had within him the soul of a poet he understood. The music of the words sank into his heart like seed planted in a fertile soil, which springs up to forms of loveliness and grace. So did the old tales bring before his eyes shapes of beauty, and once again he began to go down into the garden and try to mould them into figures of clay. His mother watched him, and saw that he persevered, and that week by week his models grew more beautiful and more true, as the image in his own mind grew clearer. Then she knew that her reading had done what she hoped it would do, and that the vague and fleeting visions had become for him forms as clear as those he saw around him. "At least my son has the soul of an artist," she thought, "but whether he has the hands and the fingers of one who can do more than play with the clay, the gods alone can tell. He shall have a master to teach him, and in time we shall see whether he is one of the many in whom the divine fire burns, but whose bodies are instruments too coarse to carry out the thoughts of the soul, or whether he is one of the few who are able to do that of which others vainly dream." So she gave him a master--a white-haired, venerable man, in whom lived the spirit of the old Greek sculptors, who had been the first to show mankind how stone and marble might be wrought into shapes of beauty. He taught the lad how to work in all kinds of stone and metal, and to copy faithfully the forms he saw around him. But he would not let him be satisfied with this alone, for he saw that he had in him the making of better things.