He waited what seemed to him a long time, forcing himself to perform certain trifling things needful in the studio, yet Mrs. Greyson had only been able to get fairly to work before she heard his footstep, and then his tap upon her door. He entered the studio almost hesitatingly, and after the usual greetings stood looking gravely at the disfigured clay. "I began to think you were never coming to restore it," he remarked, breaking at last the silence. "I could not bear to touch it," she returned, not caring to confess that she had also wished to avoid him until time should have restored his usual self-control. "But I determined yesterday to begin this morning, only strangely enough I went to church for the first time since I came from Europe." "Ah!" returned Herman smiling. "I often go to church when I am not too busy." "I hardly supposed that a Pagan was guilty of going to any church where he could not worship Pasht." "One can worship whatever deity he pleases in whatever temple, I suppose," was his rejoinder. "I'm catholic in my tastes. I do not so much mind what people worship, if they are only sincere about it." "It must be a great comfort to believe every thing, if one only could." "There is often danger," he observed, "that we assume it to be a weakness to believe any thing." "It is, I'm afraid," replied she, turning her face from him and seemingly intent upon her modeling. "At least we believe in work," Herman answered, "else we are not artists. You certainly find joy and support in your art." "Yes," Helen said with a sigh; "but I fancy the joy of creation, great as it is, can never be so satisfying to a woman as to a man. It is humiliating to confess--or it is presumptuous to boast, I am not sure which--but a woman is never so fully an artist as a man. He is in great moments all artist; but a woman is never able to lay herself aside even in her most imaginative moods." "I cannot think you wholly right," her master returned smiling; "but to go back a little, at least faith is woman's peculiar province and prerogative. We seem nowadays to pride ourselves upon being superior to belief in any thing; but it is really a poor enough hypocrisy. If we really believed nothing, should we ever give up a single selfish desire or combat any impulse that seizes us. For my part, I am glad to find men better than their professions. But this," he added with his genial smile, "is more of a sermon, very likely, than you heard at church." "I at least agree with it better than the one I heard at church this morning. The preacher patronized the Deity so that he shocked me." "That troubles me at church," Herman assented; "preachers are so irreverent." Helen stepped back to observe the effects of the work she was doing. "Do you think," she ventured, "that it would be possible for me to induce Ninitta to pose again for the May? If I told her that I am not angry, that I understand, and that----"