Two skylight windows had been made, with arrangements for modifying light from either, and a heavy curtain was partly drawn across the side-window. Near the stove at one end of the long room, on a square of carpet, were a sofa and an armchair. The space remaining was boarded and bare. At the centre stood a modelling-stand, heavy and four-legged, with a revolving top, upon which was something hidden by cloths. Framed photographs of antique sculptures adorned the walls, varied by fine bas-reliefs. Several statues occupied small pedestals; and on a side-table lay plaster casts of limbs and hands, together with odd little wooden tools, which she touched with pleasure, for they recalled old days. "And this?" she questioned, pausing beside a closed door. "Is this part of the studio?" "If I should take to plaster-casting, that will be my casting-room. At present I use it for odds and ends." He opened the door, and showed a large wooden box, lined with zinc and half-full of damp clay, prepared for use; also a water-tap with its sink, and a watering-pot with a fine rose. "One must have everything ready." "You don't do the casting yourself, then, or cutting in marble?" "I have tried my hand at both. Here—" as they returned to the larger room—"a bit of low relief, for practice. Not worth much. Carving in marble is slow work. At present I give my attention to modelling in clay." He took her round, pointing out some casts that he had brought from Italy, imitations from historic masterpieces. They lingered over a bust after the Venus of Milo; then over the copy of an ancient dilapidated torso, which Phyllys surveyed with dubious eyes. "I don't think I care about that. It might be anything." "Ah, but it is grand. The work of a great sculptor. See the moulding, how squarely it is put in. Look at those flat surfaces, and the relation of each to the whole. The main question in sculpture is not so much what a man works at as how he works at it." Then a pause, and a slow smile. "For the matter of that, the same may be said of all Art—painting, music, writing. Now I will show you something that you will appreciate." He lifted down a bas-relief in pure white plaster, a reduction from Donatelli's S. Cecilia, exquisite in delicacy of modelling. Phyllys clasped her hands with a gesture of delight, pretty because unconscious, as she drank in the beauty of that refined angelic face. Colin altered the slant of it. "See—if the light falls in a full glare you hardly make out anything. Now, if I put it so that shadows are thrown, you have the effect—you get the soul of it." He held the thing motionless, till with a sigh she murmured, "It is 'too' lovely. I'm sure of one thing—it can't be wrong to love what is beautiful." He looked at her curiously. "Barbara and Miss Robins say it is wrong to care about looks—any sort of looks—things or people. They say it is vanity and waste of time." "But true beauty is Divine."