"One day," he sighed.
It was a fine February that year, coming in with a stir of spring. Maurice felt in accord with the season's impulse, and became possessed with the ambition to create a work of art. He suggested that Jenny should come daily to the studio and sit for his statue of The Tired Dancer.
"I'm sure my real vocation is plastic," he declared. "I can write and I can play, but neither better than a lot of other people. With sculpture it's different. To begin with, there isn't such competition. It's the least general of the arts, although in another sense it's the most universal. Again, it's an art that we seem to have lost. Yet by every rule of social history, it is the art with which the present stage of evolution should be most occupied. In this era of noise and tear the splendid quiescence of great sculpture should provoke every creative mind. I have the plastic impulse, but so far I've been content to fritter it away in bits and pieces of heads and arms and hands. I must finish something; make something."
Jenny was content to sit watching him through blue wreaths of cigarette smoke. She found a sensuous delight in seeing him happy and hearing the flow of his excited talk.
"Now I must mold you, Jenny," he went on, pacing up and down in the midst of the retinue of resolutions and intentions. "By gad! I'm thrilled by the thought of it. To possess you in virgin wax, to mold your delicious shape with my own hands, to see you taking form at my compelling touch. By gad! I'm thrilled by it. What's a lyric after that? I could pour my heart out in every meter imaginable, but I should never give anything more than myself to the world. But if I make a glorious statue of you, I give you—you forever and ever for men to gaze at and love and desire. By gad! I'm thrilled by the thought of it. There's objective art. Ha! Poor old poets with their words. Where are they? You can't dig your nails into a word. By Jove, the Nereids in the British Museum. You remember those Nereids, darling?"
Jenny looked blank.
"Yes, you do. You said how much you liked them. You must remember them, so light and airy that they seem more like clouds or blowballs than solid marble."
"I think all the statues we saw was very light and airy, if it comes to that," said Jenny.
Maurice gave up pacing round the room and flung himself into a chair to discuss details of the conception.
"Of course, I'd like you to be dressed as a Columbine: and yet, I don't know, it's rather obvious."