Miriam stopped an instant in an antechamber, to look at a half-finished bust, the features of which seemed to be struggling out of the stone; and, as it were, scattering and dissolving its hard substance by the glow of feeling and intelligence.  As the skilful workman gave stroke after stroke of the chisel with apparent carelessness, but sure effect, it was impossible not to think that the outer marble was merely an extraneous environment; the human countenance within its embrace must have existed there since the limestone ledges of Carrara were first made.  Another bust was nearly completed, though still one of Kenyon’s most trustworthy assistants was at work, giving delicate touches, shaving off an impalpable something, and leaving little heaps of marble dust to attest it.

“As these busts in the block of marble,” thought Miriam, “so does our individual fate exist in the limestone of time.  We fancy that we carve it out; but its ultimate shape is prior to all our action.”

Kenyon was in the inner room, but, hearing a step in the antechamber, he threw a veil over what he was at work upon, and came out to receive his visitor.  He was dressed in a gray blouse, with a little cap on the top of his head; a costume which became him better than the formal garments which he wore whenever he passed out of his own domains.  The sculptor had a face which, when time had done a little more for it, would offer a worthy subject for as good an artist as himself:  features finely cut, as if already marble; an ideal forehead, deeply set eyes, and a mouth much hidden in a light-brown beard, but apparently sensitive and delicate.

“I will not offer you my hand,” said he; “it is grimy with Cleopatra’s clay.”

“No; I will not touch clay; it is earthy and human,” answered Miriam.  “I have come to try whether there is any calm and coolness among your marbles.  My own art is too nervous, too passionate, too full of agitation, for me to work at it whole days together, without intervals of repose.  So, what have you to show me?”

“Pray look at everything here,” said Kenyon.  “I love to have painters see my work.  Their judgment is unprejudiced, and more valuable than that of the world generally, from the light which their own art throws on mine.  More valuable, too, than that of my brother sculptors, who never judge me fairly,—­nor I them, perhaps.”

To gratify him, Miriam looked round at the specimens in marble or plaster, of which there were several in the room, comprising originals or casts of most of the designs that Kenyon had thus far produced.  He was still too young to have accumulated a large gallery of such things.  What he had to show were chiefly the attempts and experiments, in various directions, of a beginner in art, acting as a stern tutor to himself, and profiting more by his failures than by any successes of which he was yet capable.  Some of them, however, had great merit; and in the pure, fine glow of the new marble, it may be, they dazzled the judgment into awarding them higher praise than they deserved.  Miriam admired the statue of a beautiful youth, a pearlfisher; who had got entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the sea, and lay dead among the pearl-oysters, the rich shells, and the seaweeds, all of like value to him now.