Walking respectfully behind this glorious sad young person was a footman who failed to supply the contrast of usefulness to beauty. He was not even carrying the white oblong box which was evidently one of the properties of this ill-timed visit. I saw with relief that it was too narrow to contain a death-mask. Miss Chittenden held this box between her hands as if it were a very precious thing; a fold of her veil had been laid reverently around its corners. In her unconsciousness of self and in her absorption in the business that occupied her, she seemed to me a figure both sculptural and symbolic. Turned into stone, she would have been a Pandora on an antique vase, or rather a Saint Cunegonde or Saint Scholastica weathering the centuries on some mediæval portal. All her motions had a kind of free and classic largeness mingled with their high-heeled modernness; yet her attitude toward that box was, as I told myself, purest Gothic. As we undid the box together, Miss Chittenden explained that ever since she had seen my statuette of a Dancer in the new Museum in her home town, more than a year ago, she had longed above all things to possess a piece of marble from my chisel, my own chisel; “the personal touch, you know!” So (and here the forget-me-not eyes became more misty and the young voice more vibrant) when her mother died, in April, she had had a cast made from her mother’s hand, which to her was the most beautiful thing in the world; and she hoped, oh, so much, that I would be willing to copy it for her in marble. Done in the way I would do it, she was good enough to say, it would be something really living—something she could have and love forever and ever. My dismay was complete. Indeed, copying plaster casts in marble was not at all in my line. Right or wrong, I felt myself capable of higher things. Apparently this Miss Chittenden was not only classic, mediæval, and modern, but also quite Victorian, all in the same breath. For surely it was a preposterous Victorian idea of hers to want a marble hand! As we drew the cast from its wrappings, its fragile beauty moved me, I confess; but I steeled myself, steadfastly considering how on earth, without hurting the girl’s feelings, I could make her understand my point of view. “The hand is perfection itself,” said I, in all honesty. “And,” I added, glancing at her own hand, from which she had removed her ugly black glove, the better to handle the cast, “it is very like your own, in construction; I mean—” “You mean my hand is built like hers, but it’s not so pretty—” “Not so small, certainly!” I wondered whether this might vex her a bit, on her Victorian side. But no, she seemed rather pleased than otherwise. “I’m three inches taller than mother was,” she observed, cheerily. “Her size hand wouldn’t have looked at all well, on me.”