“Very likely,” said Roderick.  “But it is not the sort of expression I care for.  I care only for perfect beauty.  There it is, if you want to know it!  That ’s as good a profession of faith as another.  In future, so far as my things are not positively beautiful, you may set them down as failures.  For me, it ’s either that or nothing.  It ’s against the taste of the day, I know; we have really lost the faculty to understand beauty in the large, ideal way.  We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted.  But I don’t hesitate to proclaim it—­I mean to lift them again!  I mean to go in for big things; that ’s my notion of my art.  I mean to do things that will be simple and vast and infinite.  You ’ll see if they won’t be infinite!  Excuse me if I brag a little; all those Italian fellows in the Renaissance used to brag.  There was a sensation once common, I am sure, in the human breast—­a kind of religious awe in the presence of a marble image newly created and expressing the human type in superhuman purity.  When Phidias and Praxiteles had their statues of goddesses unveiled in the temples of the AEgean, don’t you suppose there was a passionate beating of hearts, a thrill of mysterious terror?  I mean to bring it back; I mean to thrill the world again!  I mean to produce a Juno that will make you tremble, a Venus that will make you swoon!”

“So that when we come and see you,” said Madame Grandoni, “we must be sure and bring our smelling-bottles.  And pray have a few soft sofas conveniently placed.”

“Phidias and Praxiteles,” Miss Blanchard remarked, “had the advantage of believing in their goddesses.  I insist on believing, for myself, that the pagan mythology is not a fiction, and that Venus and Juno and Apollo and Mercury used to come down in a cloud into this very city of Rome where we sit talking nineteenth century English.”

“Nineteenth century nonsense, my dear!” cried Madame Grandoni.  “Mr. Hudson may be a new Phidias, but Venus and Juno—­that ’s you and I—­arrived to-day in a very dirty cab; and were cheated by the driver, too.”

“But, my dear fellow,” objected Gloriani, “you don’t mean to say you are going to make over in cold blood those poor old exploded Apollos and Hebes.”

“It won’t matter what you call them,” said Roderick.  “They shall be simply divine forms.  They shall be Beauty; they shall be Wisdom; they shall be Power; they shall be Genius; they shall be Daring.  That ’s all the Greek divinities were.”

“That ’s rather abstract, you know,” said Miss Blanchard.

“My dear fellow,” cried Gloriani, “you ’re delightfully young.”

“I hope you ’ll not grow any older,” said Singleton, with a flush of sympathy across his large white forehead.  “You can do it if you try.”

“Then there are all the Forces and Mysteries and Elements of Nature,” Roderick went on.  “I mean to do the Morning; I mean to do the Night!  I mean to do the Ocean and the Mountains; the Moon and the West Wind.  I mean to make a magnificent statue of America!”