But the posing of Apollos (one can’t forget that!) was absolutely the best I had ever met anywhere. He first came to me when I was doing that big California thing; you know, the one they call Three Angels, two of the angels being winged marble youths in flat relief, kneeling, and the third a retributive sort of shrouded female figure in bronze, standing, of course, and dominating the other two. Get me? Oh, yes, in the round, she was. I had no trouble in finding her type, no trouble at all. Powerful women abound, these days. But the youths were a more difficult matter. Of course I didn’t want them to look Athenian, as if I’d just dislodged them from the Parthenon frieze, and given them a pair of wings apiece; but then, on the other hand, I didn’t care to have them suggest that I’d merely picked them up on the beach at Coney Island, the Sunday before. Angels mustn’t bear too personal a stamp, you know. To my thinking, no artist has ever surpassed Saint-Gaudens in creating the impersonal, other-worldly type. But he always used a lot of wonder-drapery for his angelic hosts; I had merely wings. I had tried a good many youths from thirteen to thirty, before I finally decided to take with me to my summer studio, for a period of ten weeks, Apollos Rivers and Phineas Stickney. Remembering those tinted ears, I had some doubt about Apollos and his staying powers through a country summer, far from all but the most elementary sort of movies and like attractions; but I had a hope that the influence of Phineas Stickney, coupled with my own persuasions, would keep the boy on the side of the angels. In fact, the angels were all that counted with me, that summer. The commission was an important one, and the contract ironclad. If within three years I couldn’t produce the Three Angels, “complete in place and in the final materials as hereinbefore specified,” my name, on the Golden Coast, would be mud instead of Jefferson. And the three years had by now dwindled to one year only! Time pressed. I’d been diligent and fore-handed enough, Heaven knows. If anything, I am diligent to a fault. The retributive woman was all done in bronze; but those two youths weren’t yet ready for the plaster, let alone the “final materials as hereinbefore specified.”