I was right so far. Psyche is the Greek for the soul. I ventured further.
“The human soul, the artistic soul.”
Mrs. Ascher appeared to be absolutely hanging on my words. I plunged on.
“Aspiring,” I said, “reaching after the unattainable.”
I would not have said, “hoping for a yawn” for anything that could have been offered me; but the young woman who stood for Mrs. Ascher’s Psyche must have longed for that relief. The attitude in which she was posed suggested yawning all the time, and we all know how fatal it is to think of a yawn.
“Quite unfinished,” said Mrs. Ascher with a sigh.
“The fault of New York,” I said. “When you get home again——”
I hesitated. I did not wish to commit myself to a confession of ignorance, and I do not know whether a damp, soft Psyche can be packed up and transported across the Atlantic to be finished in London.
“But the aspiration is there,” I said, “and you owe that to New York. The air, the very same air which forbids completion, is charged with aspiration. We all feel it. The city itself aspires. Since the great days when men set out to build a tower the top of which should reach unto heaven, there has never been such aspiration anywhere in the world. Look at the Woolworth Building.”
I was maundering and I knew it. Mrs. Ascher’s statuette was very nice and graceful; a much better thing than I expected to see, but there was nothing in it, nothing at all in the way of thought or emotion. There must be hundreds of people who can turn out clay girls just as good as that Psyche. Somehow I had expected something different from Mrs. Ascher, less skill in modelling, less care, but more temperament.