Before I could frame an answer to that, Gigi emerged, pushing before him a little stand on which was a block of fine pink marble which I had obtained years before, in peculiar circumstances. It was a piece I had long been guarding for some future master-work of mine—something that was to be absolutely original, yet wholly classic; one has such dreams. And here was Gigi showing it to that girl! His admiration for her had become so boundless that he opened up his heart to her in all the three languages he could use. If the Signorina would deign, he would explain to Mademoiselle that this was a little, little block of marble which his own _cognato_ had stolen one night (knowing it to be a good action) from the workshop of the marvellous Duomo which she herself would see when she saw the most beautiful cathedral in all Italy! And his brother-in-law had sold it to a great sculptor who was visiting Italy at that time, but of course did not know it was stolen. (Gigi was lying a little, but his lying blends so agreeably with his candor that I myself cannot always distinguish one from the other.) I saw that the blue-eyed girl was thoroughly enjoying Gigi. Though this was before the day of the so-called Greenwich Village, I am sure that Miss Chittenden thought that now at last, freed alike from her Missouri uncle and her Fifth Avenue aunt, she was seeing Bohemia; perfectly respectably too. If only a celebrated model or two had strayed in, her happiness would have been complete. As it was, she garnered up Gigi’s sayings with the same single-hearted attention she had given to my own. He explained, in his party-colored way of speech, that this little block was marvellously fine in grain; it was free from dark streaks, too—he would stake the tomb of his fathers on that!—while its crowning exquisiteness lay in its color, a pale surpassing pink as of earliest dawn over Tuscany. There was no other marble in the world quite like it. That was why his _cognato_ had been _obliged_ to steal it, for the sake of art. If you had any taste at all, any love for the beautiful, you would call it using, not stealing! And again, behold! While it was too small for a head (except a _bambino’s_ head, and it was a little too long for that, unless you wasted a great deal, and certainly it was more of a sin to waste such marble than to steal it), it was just exactly the right size for the dear hand of the Signorina’s mother, lying upon the open book, or even on the closed book, with the knitting-needles protruding; difficult, of course, but where there’s a wish, there’s a road— I stared astounded at Gigi. In all the ten years he had worked for me, I had never heard from him so many words at once. I could not dam the flood. “_Ah, oui_,” he pursued, “_certamente_ Mademoiselle could have the lace around the wrist, if she so wished, and—”