What I ought to have said then was this: “My dear young lady, if you really want to advance your country’s art (and very laudable it is on your part!) and if you insist that your heart’s desire is to be carried out in marble, by my chisel, as you put it, why in the name of all that’s young and gay and jubilant don’t you ask me to do you a dancer, or a fountain figure, or a nymph, or a faun, or even a mantelpiece, with some joyous caryatids?” But I didn’t say anything of the kind. Besides, a horrid thought came to me that perhaps she might not understand caryatid, or might get the word confused with hermaphrodite, as I have observed that tourists returning from Italian galleries sometimes do, even when duly instructed. Indeed, the forget-me-not eyes rested so lovingly on the plaster cast that I hadn’t the heart to be coldly frank with her, and to tell her that in a few years the marble hand she now wanted might seem an encumbrance; something that for old sake’s sake she couldn’t bear to tuck away in the attic, and yet something that one really couldn’t, if one kept up with the times, put in a glass case on a library shelf, or on one’s own dressing-table. Some of our sculptors might have managed it. I can imagine that brute of a Schneider, for example, telling her that there was nothing in it for her; that a “marple hant would be too pig for a baber-wade, and too liddle for a lawn-tecoration.” He would be able to suggest that the proper move for her to make would be to build a fine large monument to her mother, with the hand “joost as a veature.” But since I’m not Schneider, all I could say was, “This cast is beautiful, indeed, but aren’t you afraid that when translated into marble, it will no longer seem so lovely and so living to you?” “Ah, but,” persisted the girl, “the marble of it is part of all I want! All I want is mother’s hand, done by your hand.” She blushed, and so did I. “It’s very kind of you to want my work,” I stammered. “Really, it makes me feel awfully grateful, and humble, too! But do you realize that very few of our sculptors carve in marble the things they model in clay? The custom is, to let some carver, generally an Italian, do most if not all of the marble-carving, just as it’s the custom to have a bronze foundry cast our bronze statues. You see,” I went on, warming to my task of educating this bright being, “things are different now from what they were in Cellini’s time, or Michael Angelo’s. In Renaissance days, a sculptor could do the whole job from start to finish, if he wanted to, but to-day, he can’t, and doesn’t want to. He saves himself for what he fondly thinks is the imaginative and intellectual part. He models in clay, of course, but there’s a lot besides that. There’s building armatures, and making plaster casts, and so on; and he generally lets Gigi do it.”