But he did not take long to collect himself for the Bithynian’s beauty filled him with profound feeling and it was with a sort of pious exaltation that he grasped the plastic material and moulded it into a form resembling his sitter.  For a whole hour not a word passed between them, but Pollux often sighed deeply and now then a groan of painful anxiety escaped him.

Antinous broke the silence to ask Pollux about Selene.  His heart was full of her, and there was no other man who knew her, and whom he could venture to entrust with his secret.  Indeed it was only to speak to her that he had come to the artist so early.  While Pollux modelled and scraped Antinous told him of all that had happened the previous night.  He lamented having lost the silver quiver when he was upset into the water and regretted that the rose-colored chiton should afterwards have suffered a reduction in length at the hands of his pursuer.  An exclamation of surprise, a word of sympathy, a short pause in the movement of his hand and tool, were all the demonstration on the artist’s part, to which the story of Selene’s adventure and the loss of his master’s costly property gave rise; his whole attention was absorbed in his occupation.  The farther his work progressed the higher rose his admiration for his model.  He felt as if intoxicated with noble wine as he worked to reproduce this incarnation of the ideal of umblemished youthful and manly beauty.  The passion of artistic procreation fired his blood, and threw every thing else—­even the history of Selene’s fall into the sea, and her subsequent rescue—­into the region of commonplace.  Still he had not been inattentive, and what he heard must have had some effect in his mind; for long after Antinous had ended his narrative, he said in a low voice and as if speaking to the bust, which was already assuming definite form: 

“It is a wonderful thing!” and again a little later; “There was always something grand in that unhappy creature.”

He had worked without interruption for nearly four hours, when standing back from the table, he looked anxiously, first at his work and then at Antinous, and then asked him: 

“How will that do?”

The Bithynian gave eager expression to his approbation, and Pollux had, in fact, done wonders in the short time.  The wax began to display in a much reduced scale the whole figure of the beautiful youth and in the very same attitude which the young Dionysus carried off by the pirates, had assumed the day before.  The incomparable modelling of the favorite’s limbs and form was soft but not effeminate; and, as Pollux had said to himself the day before, no artist in his happiest mood, could conceive the Nysaean god as different from this.

While the sculptor in order to assure himself of the accuracy of his work was measuring his model’s limbs with wooden compasses and lengths of tape, the sound of chariot-wheels was heard at the gate of the palace, and soon after the yelping of the Graces.  Doris called to the dogs to be quiet and another high-pitched woman’s voice mingled with hers.  Antinous listened and what he heard seemed to be somewhat out of the common for he suddenly quitted the position in which the sculptor had placed him only a few minutes before, ran to the window and called to Pollux in a subdued voice: