“Well,” said Frederick, somewhat confused, “it is perhaps the essence of perversion that a person feels compelled to hoodwink people by doing things and making statements the very reverse of what is natural and what is to be expected.  Miss Burns, I wish, I heartily wish, you would look out a little for that poor creature drifting about without anybody or anything to guide her.”

“Good-bye,” said Miss Burns, hailing a car.  “Come and start work in the studio as soon as possible.  As for your little friend, she is too self-willed.  In fact, she has an iron will.  There is no holding her, or leading her, that would keep her from doing anything she had once made up her mind to do.”

When the car had carried Miss Burns off into the stream of New York traffic, Frederick, strangely enough, had a fleeting sense of forlornness, to him a novel sensation.  Feeling inclined to taste it to the full, he continued to walk the streets alone, choosing his way at random.  For the first time after speaking so freely to a comparative stranger, he did not regret his conduct.  Again and again he went over in his mind his first meeting with Miss Burns in the studio, her manner during the lively carousal, when they discussed the wooden Madonna, his second meeting with her on the street, her upright carriage, her proud eyes, her imposing appearance in the little cosmopolitan restaurant.  Without intending to, she undeniably dominated her surroundings, and that merely as a result of her naturalness.  It had given Frederick secret pleasure to watch her eat and drink daintily, yet heartily, without any airs or graces, and systematically dissect her orange and peel her apple.  Eating and drinking was to her a noble, legitimate and also inevitable act, not to be disposed of lightly beneath a foolish masquerade.  When Frederick recommended Ingigerd to her guidance, he did so because he himself had experienced a beneficent influence from her remarks, dictated by a beautiful intellect, and from the glance of her straight, honest, scrutinising eyes.

“At the risk of making myself ridiculous,” he said to himself, “I will go to Ritter’s studio to-morrow morning, bury my hands in the clay, and try to reconstruct my life again from the bottom up out of moist clay.”

XV

At about ten o’clock the next morning Ritter himself gave Frederick a very glad, bright welcome to his studio, and assigned to him a small room opening on Miss Burns’s room.  Miss Burns proposed that he begin by copying a plaster-cast of the arm of the Saxon athlete.

Frederick for the first time handled the moist clay fraught with so much significance, the clay out of which the gods made man and man in turn has made gods.  As a result of the hours he had spent in Rome with sculptor friends, watching them work and observing each movement of their fingers, he accomplished his task with great ease, to his own astonishment and Miss Burns’s admiration.  His anatomical knowledge and medical experience also stood him in good stead.  Shortly before completing his course as a medical student, he had for a time entertained the idea of publishing an anatomy for sculptors, and with this in view had made a number of drawings which won the favour of real connoisseurs.