"This young lady knows something of your art." "I learnt to knead clay a little of Aristaeus," interrupted Balbilla. "Aha! because Caesar set the fashion, and in Rome it would have been conspicuous not to dabble in sculpture." "Perhaps." "And she tried to improve in every bust all that particularly displeased her," continued Claudia. "I only began the work for the slaves to finish," Balbilla threw in, interrupting her companion. "Indeed, my people became quite expert in the work of destruction." "Then my work may, at any rate, hope for a short agony and speedy death," sighed Pollux. "And it is true--all that lives comes into the world with its end already preordained." "Would an early demise of your work pain you much? "asked Balbilla. "Yes, if I thought it successful; not if I felt it to be a failure." "Any one who keeps a bad bust," said Balbilla, "must feel fearful lest an undeservedly bad reputation is handed down to future generations." "Certainly! but how then can you find courage to expose yourself for the sixth time to a form of calumny that it is difficult to counteract?" "Because I can have anything destroyed that I choose," laughed the spoilt girl. "Otherwise sitting still is not much to my taste." "That is very true," sighed Claudia. "But from you I expect something strikingly good." "Thank you," said Pollux, "and I will take the utmost pains to complete something that may correspond to my own expectations of what a marble portrait ought to be, that deserves to be preserved to posterity." "And those expectations require--?" Pollux considered for a moment, and then he replied: "I have not always the right words at my command, for all that I feel as an artist. A plastic presentiment, to satisfy its creator, must fulfil two conditions; first it must record for posterity in forms of eternal resemblance all that lay in the nature of the person it represents; secondly, it must also show to posterity what the art of the time when it was executed, was capable of." "That is a matter of course--but you are forgetting your own share." "My own fame you mean?" "Certainly." "I work for Papias and serve my art, and that is enough; meanwhile Fame does not trouble herself about me, nor do I trouble myself about her." "Still, you will put your name on my bust?" "Why not?" "You are as prudent as Cicero." "Cicero?" "Perhaps you would hardly know old Tullius' wise remark that the philosophers who wrote of the vanity of writers put their names to their books all the same." "Oh! I have no contempt for laurels, but I will not run after a thing which could have no value for me, unless it came unsought, and because it was my due." "Well and good; but your first condition could only be fulfilled in its widest sense if you could succeed in making yourself acquainted with my thoughts and feelings, with the whole of my inmost mind." "I see you and talk to you," replied Pollux. Claudia laughed aloud, and said: