Now that Bullwinkle bust had always been a vexation to my spirit, partly because old Bullwinkle had so often played truant, instead of giving me the necessary sittings. He was forever travelling about the country for political purposes, or else attending the funerals of near relatives. Sometimes I fancied that he would go to any lengths, no matter how criminal, rather than face me from the sitter’s chair. The commission, given to me by a group of Bullwinkle enthusiasts, was to be handsomely paid, but was to be kept a profound secret from the world until the finished bronze bust should be set in place as the crowning ornament of the celebrated five-million-dollar Bullwinkle Building, at that time under way. To me, there was something rather childish about this pseudo-secrecy, openly kept up for nearly two years. But above all, that bust bothered me because I myself had not yet mastered it. As it stood there in the searching May light, I saw in its loose ends, its uninteresting planes, its prosaic light-and-dark, its flabbiness of brow and cheek, its dreary wastes of shirt bosom and lapel, only a monument to my own incapacity to seize and reveal the characteristics of my subject;—to tell in my clay all the news that was fit to print about him, with just enough more to keep the spectator guessing. Lord, how I had tried, and failed, to penetrate the Bullwinkle personality! At first, I had privately laughed at the Senator as a ridiculous old card, holding on to the present and yearning toward the future, but in reality, living only on the past and its triumphs. Indeed, his middle years had been a pageant of triumphs. Very soon, however, I found I was not getting on with my work. The man worried me. I could not discover what there was within him that had lifted him above the shoulders of the crowd. I could not for the life of me isolate his own private germ of human grandeur, and inoculate my clay with it. Yet I acknowledged grandeur in him. It would be absurd to attribute to anything so blind as chance his astounding command over human votes. To be baffled by a Bullwinkle was a chastening lesson. I dreaded that afternoon sitting. My wife was away, and there could be no readings from the “Congressional Record.” What would that do to him? Would it bring him out, or shut him in? To get a running start, I had pulled the bust out into the fresh morning light, and like a dull child trying to find his place in yesterday’s lesson, I was fumbling about on the pedestal, the shirt-front, and the senatorial dewlaps, when a ring at my door and voices in the anteroom warned me to slip a cover over this work of high secrecy.