The foregoing conversation had been carried on in a mood in which all imaginative people, whether artists or poets, love to indulge.  In this frame of mind, they sometimes find their profoundest truths side by side with the idlest jest, and utter one or the other, apparently without distinguishing which is the most valuable, or assigning any considerable value to either.  The resemblance between the marble Faun and their living companion had made a deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression on these three friends, and had taken them into a certain airy region, lifting up, as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted, their heavy earthly feet from the actual soil of life.  The world had been set afloat, as it were, for a moment, and relieved them, for just so long, of all customary responsibility for what they thought and said.

It might be under this influence—­or, perhaps, because sculptors always abuse one another’s works—­that Kenyon threw in a criticism upon the Dying Gladiator.

“I used to admire this statue exceedingly,” he remarked, “but, latterly, I find myself getting weary and annoyed that the man should be such a length of time leaning on his arm in the very act of death.  If he is so terribly hurt, why does he not sink down and die without further ado?  Flitting moments, imminent emergencies, imperceptible intervals between two breaths, ought not to be incrusted with the eternal repose of marble; in any sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill, since there must of necessity be a physical one.  Otherwise, it is like flinging a block of marble up into the air, and, by some trick of enchantment, causing it to stick there.  You feel that it ought to come down, and are dissatisfied that it does not obey the natural law.”

“I see,” said Miriam mischievously, “you think that sculpture should be a sort of fossilizing process.  But, in truth, your frozen art has nothing like the scope and freedom of Hilda’s and mine.  In painting there is no similar objection to the representation of brief snatches of time,—­perhaps because a story can be so much more fully told in picture, and buttressed about with circumstances that give it an epoch.  For instance, a painter never would have sent down yonder Faun out of his far antiquity, lonely and desolate, with no companion to keep his simple heart warm.”

“Ah, the Faun!” cried Hilda, with a little gesture of impatience; “I have been looking at him too long; and now, instead of a beautiful statue, immortally young, I see only a corroded and discolored stone.  This change is very apt to occur in statues.”

“And a similar one in pictures, surely,” retorted the sculptor.  “It is the spectator’s mood that transfigures the Transfiguration itself.  I defy any painter to move and elevate me without my own consent and assistance.”

“Then you are deficient of a sense,” said Miriam.