MacGregor gave her a sidelong glance, hemmed, made an unnecessary trip across the studio, and kicked a fallen burnous violently. "But you went on modeling?" he asked, returning. "Yes--by and by. Then, later, I stopped." "Why?" "I--I hadn't the clay?" she evaded. MacGregor brooded over her handiwork a moment longer, then squared his jaw. "You'll have the 'clay' hereafter," he said. XXI At the outset she was rather skeptical of his faith in her. Had not Atwood said that MacGregor saw genius in all his friends? But the younger man now hailed him a most discerning judge. "It's the something I divined," he declared jubilantly, "the gold-bearing vein I believed in, but hadn't the luck to unearth. Now to develop it! What does Mac advise?" "One of the art schools," said Jean. "I can go evenings, it seems." "And work days! It's a stiff programme you plan." "But the school won't mean work," she declared. "Then, too, the posing comes far easier than it did. Mr. MacGregor says my muscles are almost as steady as a professional's." "So he tells me. I'm going to insist on sharing your time. He has monopolized you long enough." MacGregor's monopoly did not cease at once, however. His first step on discovering Jean's talent was to enlist Richter's expert criticism and counsel with the practical outcome that the sculptor's door swung open to her in the daylight hours when MacGregor worked with male models. The clay-modeling-room at the art school was a wonderful place. Its casts, its tools, its methods, were a revelation after the crude shifts with which her father had had to content himself; but Richter's studio transcended it as a university transcends a kindergarten. Here were conceived ideas which found perpetuity in bronze! Studio and sculptor were each unique. A little man of crippled frame, Karl Richter delighted in the muscular and the colossal and walked a pigmy amidst his own creations. Michael Angelo was his god; but his manner was his own, and the Indians and cow-boys he loved best to express were remote enough from the great Florentine's subjects to acquit him of imitation. His frail physique notwithstanding, he had been at pains to see for himself the primitive life he adored, and the idler who coined "The Oasis" dubbed the sculptor's place "The Wigwam," and spread a facetious tale that Richter went about his work in blanket and moccasins, and habitually smoked a calumet which had once belonged to Sitting Bull. Richter never denied this myth, which by now had received the sanction of print, and took huge satisfaction in the crestfallen glances unknown callers gave his conventional dress. However, the studio itself, a transformed stable, was sufficiently picturesque. It overflowed with spoils from ranch and tepee, and, thanks to the Wild West show which furnished MacGregor occasional Arabs, sometimes sheltered genuine, if sophisticated, red men.