“Clay is a happy medium,” he said. “That boy is nearly enough your boy to make you nearly happy. Clay is a possible element for our wills to work in. But human flesh, and human mind, Cornelia! They are weighted with a past so deep and so remote we are helpless before it. I know. Remember a joke I used to play on you? The uncut grass by the barn: how I made you try to stand a stick on end whose tip was fastened to an invisible string? And whenever you thought you had it balanced, I’d give a little jerk and the thing toppled?” She stood off from her figure. She came forward; her finger touched a plane into shadow; she stepped away as if there had been some vital shock in the swift contact. “Well?...” she said, not letting either her words, or his, eat beneath the surface of her mind. Tom knew he could spread a bath of acid that might take its time in eating downward, yet leave its mark. “I think, Cornelia, I have the same love as yourself for making forms. But there is something perverse and accurst in me: something that keeps me from spending my appetite on some reasonably complaisant substance, like clay or pigment or even words. Like you.... _I_ must of course write my poems in human life. And, Cornelia, it doesn’t work.” He paused. “I dined with your friend, David, last night.” Again a silence. “I ended by running off to a trumped-up engagement because I simply could not stand his bland stupidity any longer.” He got up and took a cigarette and lighted it. It went out at once. “I am a fool,” he said. Slowly he began to tell the wall against which he pressed his cheek, half plaintively, the misery of the man whose medium is action. Cornelia destroyed her boy’s nose. She remodeled it. While he talked, crouched with his cheek flat to the wall, she hummed an aria from _Lohengrin_--desultorily, false-simply, with evident satisfaction to herself. “Is there no mellowness in America? Is there none of the sweetness of ripe soil? David can be as vulgar as Ruth’s carpenter-lover. Sometimes I wonder is the chief product of American activity to be sweat. Bah! We sat there: and David lectured me. To the effect that truth and beauty are antagonistic and we must side with truth. When I asked him what was truth, he answered: ‘Morality is true,’ When I asked him, ‘Pray what might Morality be?’ he said: ‘If you don’t know, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! If you are going to be flippant, we’d better go back to our last subject.’ And, Lord of Hosts! our last subject had been _Balzac_!” Tom was gone. Gone so abruptly, the door stayed a-jar behind him. Quickly Cornelia threw the damp cloth over her model and seated herself on the couch; she held her head tight in her two hands. Her mind was quick with the sharp-eating lines of her brother.