"Only finish it, Hans!" cried the younger man. "Dream out your dream, and I will vouch for it that, however stupidly and sleepily men are plodding on, this lightning-stroke of genius will dash the scales from their eyes! Why haven't you made more progress with your Eve?" "Because I have never yet found a model; and because I will not botch my work by mere patching together of my own recollections, or by the last resort of borrowing from the Venus of Milo. Ah, my dear fellow--the fine figures you think you saw in the streets to-day--psha! you'll soon think otherwise. The German corset-makers, the school-room benches, and the miserable food we live on, may possibly leave enough of dear old Nature for me to make a laughing-doll out of, like my dancer there; but a future mother of mankind, untouched as yet by any breath of want or degradation, and fresh from the hand of her Creator--what do you think our professional models would say to that--or the seamstresses or flower-girls that money or persuasion can induce to enter the service of art? If it were a Roman, now, or a Greek, or any untamed child of Nature who had grown up under a happier heaven than ours! And that is what makes the ground here fairly burn under my feet--and if they were not fettered with leaden fetters--" He suddenly checked himself, and a dark shadow passed across his face; but Felix shrunk from the effort to draw from him by a question any confidence beyond what Jansen offered willingly. At this moment the clock in a neighboring tower struck twelve; and for a few moments the bells for mid-day service filled the pause that had interrupted the talk of the two friends. The sculptor began to wrap up the group again, after he had given it a thorough sprinkling. And then, while Felix examined in silence the other sculptures, many of which were familiar, he went to a wash-stand in a corner, where he washed the traces of the clay from his hands and face, and exchanged his working-blouse for a light summer-coat.