"It’s rather early." "They sometimes get up early and breakfast together at Claremont," remarked Helen, working serenely away. The freckled livery-stable lad who held the horse for her and occasionally backed him into the pose again continued to chew gum and watch the pretty sculptor with absorbed interest. "I’ve got such an interesting commission," she said, wetting down her clay with a huge and dripping sponge. "It’s for the new Academy of Arts and Letters to be built uptown, and my equestrian figure is to be cast in silver bronze for the great marble court." "What is the subject?" he asked, preoccupied by what she had told him about Stephanie, yet watching this busy and efficient young girl who, with the sleeves of her blue blouse rolled up, displaying her superb young arms, stood vigorously kneading a double handful of clay and studying the restless horse with clear and very beautiful brown eyes. "The subject? ’Aspiration.’ I made some sketches—a winged horse taking flight upward. A nude female figure, breathless, with dishevelled hair, has just flung itself upon the rearing, wide-winged Pegasus and is sticking there like a cat to the back fence—hanging on tooth and nail with one leg just over and the other close against the beast’s ribs, and her desperate fingers in the horse’s mane.... I don’t know. It sounds interesting but it may be too violent. But I’ve had that idea—hope, aspiration, fear and determination clinging to a furious winged animal that is just starting upward like a roaring sky-rocket——" She turned her head, laughing: "Is it a rotten idea?" "I don’t know," he said absently. "It’s worth trying out, anyway." She nodded; and he went on about the business of breakfast. But had now no appetite. There was one thing, Cleland soon found out, against which he was helpless. Stephanie frequented Grismer at any hour of the day and evening that her fancy prompted. This perplexed him and made him sullen; but when he incautiously started to remonstrate with her one evening her surprise and anger flashed like a clear little flame, and she explained very clearly what was the essence of personal liberty, and that the one thing she would not tolerate from him or anybody else was any invasion of her freedom of thought and action. Silenced, enraged, and humiliated at the rebuke he had retired to his studio to sulk like Achilles—a sullen mourner at the bier of love. For he fully and firmly determined to eradicate this girl from his life and devote it to scourging the exasperating sex of which she was a beautiful but baffling member. The trouble with Stephanie, however, was that she could not seem to see the tragedy in his life or understand that a young man desired to suffer nobly and haughtily and at his own leisure and convenience.