"Till you see me in bronze!" thrilled young Kennilworth himself.
Never in all my life have I beheld anyone as beautiful as Claude Kennilworth—with a bit of brag in him! That head sharply uplifted, the pony-like forelock swished like smoke across his flaming eyes, the sudden wild pulse of his throat. Heavens! What a boy!
"You artist-fellows are forever reproducing solids with liquids," remarked my Husband quite casually. "All the effects I mean! All the illusion! Crag or cathedral out of a dime-sized mud-puddle in your water-color box! Flesh you could kiss from a splash of turpentine! But can you reproduce liquids with solids? Could you put the ocean into bronze, I mean?"
"The ocean?" screamed the Satellites.
"No mere skinny bas-relief," mused my Husband, "of the front of a wave hitched to the front of a wharf or the front of a beach but waves corporeally complete and all alone— shoreless—skyless—like the model of a village an ocean rolling all alone as it were in the bulk of its three dimensions?"
"In—bronze?" questions young Kennilworth. "Bronze?" His voice was very faintly raspish.
"Oh, it wasn't a blue ocean especially that I was thinking about," confided my Husband, genially, through the mist of his cigarette. "Any chance pick-up acquaintance has seen the ocean when it's blue. But my wife and I, you understand, we live with the ocean! Call it by its first name,—'Oh Ocean!' —and all that sort of thing!" he smiled out abruptly above the sudden sharp spurt of a freshly-struck match. "The—the ocean I was thinking of," he resumed with an almost exaggerated monotone, "was a brown ocean—brown as boiled sea-weeds—mad as mud under a leaden sky—seething—souring—perfectly lusterless—every brown billow-top pinched-up as though by some malevolent hand into a vivid verdigris bruise——"
"But however in the world would one know where to begin?" giggled the Satellites. "Or how to break it off so it wouldn't end like the edge of a tin roof! Even if you started all right with a nice molten wave? What about the—last wave? The problem of the horizon sense? Yes! What about the horizon sense?" shouted everybody at once.
From the shadowy sofa-pillowed corner just behind the supper table, young Kennilworth's face glowed suddenly into view. But a minute before I could have sworn that a girl's cheek lay against his. Yet now as he jumped to his feet the feminine glove that dropped from his fidgety fingers was twisted with extraordinary maliciousness, I noted, into a doll-sized caricature of a "Vamp."
"I could put the ocean into bronze, Mr. Delville," he said, "if anybody would give me a chance!"