"I know," interrupted Leighton. "Well, it worked. It worked as such cures seldom do. While Vi was sobbing her heart out on the couch, I smashed up the statue with a mallet. That's my confession." Lewis did not move. "Did you hear what I said?" asked Leighton. "I smashed up your model of Vi." "I heard you, Dad," said Lewis. "But you mustn't expect me to get excited over it, because it's what I should have done myself, once she had seen it." "When I did it," continued Leighton, "I had no doubts; but since then I've thought a lot. I want you to know that if that cast had gone into marble or bronze, it would have had the eternal life of art itself." Lewis flushed with pleasure. He knew that such praise from his father must have been weighed a thousand times before it gained utterance. Only from one other man on earth could commendation bring such a thrill. As the name of Le Brux came to his mind, it fell from his father's lips. "Le Brux has been giving me an awful talking to." "Le Brux!" cried Lewis. "Has he been here?" "Only in spirit," said Leighton, smiling. "And this is what he said in his voice of thunder: 'If I had been here, I would have stood by that figure with a mallet and smashed the head of any man that raised a finger against it. What is the world coming to when a mere life weighs more in the balance than the most trifling material expression of eternity? "'But, Master,' I said, 'a gentleman must always remember the woman.' "To which he replied, 'What business has an artist to be anything so small as a mere gentleman? It is not alone for fame and repute that we great have our being. If by the loss of my single soul I can touch a thousand other souls to life, bring sight to the blind and hearing to ears that would not hear, what, then, is my soul? Nothing.'" Leighton stopped and leaned forward. "Then he said this, and the thunder was gone from his voice: 'When all the trappings of the world's religions have rotted away, the vicarious intention and example of Christ will still stand and bring a surge to the hearts of unforgetful men. Thou child, believe me, what humanity has gained of the best is founded solidly on sacrifice--on the individual ruin of many men and women and little children.'" Leighton paused. Lewis was sitting with locked hands. He was trying to detach his mind from personalities. "That's a great sophistry, isn't it?" he said. "Do you know the difference between a sophistry and a great sophistry?" asked Leighton. "A sophistry is a lie; a great sophistry is merely super-truth." "I can see," he went on, "that it's difficult for you to put yourself outside sculpture. Let's switch off to literature, because literature, next to music, is the supreme expression in art. I heard one of the keenest men in London say the other day, 'The man who writes a book that everybody agrees with is one of two things: a mere grocer of amusement or a mental pander to cash.'