To my amazement, the Senator stood at bay over the marble, as if it were a prize to be defended against all comers. He fairly flamed with intensity. I never saw a man more alive, more tingling with a sense of being alive. For the first time, I could learn, from my own eyes and not from historic hearsay, something of his power over his fellow-men. His eyes looked large, his jowls turned taut, his upstanding hair, which I had thought almost ridiculous, became sublime. He seemed a creature expressly framed for the applause of listening senates. In a twinkling, and when I least expected it, I saw more of the real man than I had found out in all my passionate searching during those frustrate sittings. No doubt, my searching had helped toward my present illuminated vision; that vision was but the culmination, the happy ending, of my quest. Like Childe Roland, I had been expecting too much, perhaps, from my Dark Tower. What a fool I had been to suppose that the Senator’s germ of greatness lay in some noble difference between himself and others! Why, it was plain as day that his greatness lay, not in his difference from the rest of the world, oh, no, not that; his greatness was mainly in his rich, happy, sympathetic commonness. He was not so much a man above men, as a man among men. My mistake was, I had been trying to win the Senator; I should have let him try to win me, according to his bent and usage. So I sprang back to my modelling, and let him be himself. It did not matter to me, now, that he was striding, gesticulating, quivering; at heart, I have always believed, with George de Forest Brush, that a model on the move, and really alive, is far better to work from than one sitting still as a sod. And now, as I studied my man anew, I perceived all at once that a dozen good dominating strokes rightly placed on my clay could turn it from a mess to a masterpiece. I became two persons, as every artist at times must. Each was sharply awake. One of these two was modelling for dear life on that portrait, smiting the thing now here, now there; unhasting, unresting; gathering up rich handfuls of all the released individuality of greatness that I now saw radiating from a transfigured Senatorial countenance, and compressing that individuality into clay for the plaster-moulder’s sacrifice and the bronze-founder’s furnace. The other man in me was listening amiably to a Bullwinkle speech of self-revelation. I suppose that under my skin there was even a third person, ironically reminding me that it was never _my_ hand that had touched the button to switch all this new light on a stale matter. It was another hand, a lady’s hand, a marble hand, too; and a hand rejected by a chit. Such reminders drive a man to humility, even while he is winning the game. For I _was_ winning; there could be no doubt of that, now.