“There’s nothing else worth showing,” she said, “except perhaps this. Yes, except this.”
She unwrapped more bandages. A damp, pale-grey head appeared. It was standing in a large saucer or soup plate. At first I thought she had been at John the Baptist and had chosen the moment when his head lay in the charger ready for the dancing girl to take to her mother. Fortunately I looked at it carefully before speaking. I saw that it was Tim Gorman’s head.
“He sat to me,” said Mrs. Ascher, “and by degrees I came to know him very well. One does, one cannot help it, talking to a person every day and watching, always watching. Do you think——?”
“I think it’s wonderful,” I said.
This time I spoke with real and entire conviction. I am no expert judge of anything in the world except perhaps a horse or a bottle of claret, but I was impressed by this piece of Mrs. Ascher’s work. Tim Gorman’s fine eyes were the only things about him which struck me as noticeable. No artist can model eyes in clay. But Mrs. Ascher had got all that I saw in his eyes into the head before me—all and a great deal more. She had somehow succeeded in making the lips, the nostrils, the forehead, the cheek-bones, express the fact that Tim Gorman is an idealist, a dreamer of fine dreams and at the same time innocent as a child which looks out at the world with wonder. I do not know how the woman did it. I should not have supposed her capable of even seeing what she had expressed in her clay, but there it was.
“You really like it?”
She spoke with a curious note of humility in her voice. My impulse was to say that I liked her, for the first time saw the real good in her; but I could not say that.
“Like it!” I said. “It isn’t for me to like or dislike it. I don’t know anything about those things. I am not capable of judging. But this seems to me to be really great.”
“Ah!” said Mrs. Ascher, “and this time you are sincere.”
She looked at me quite gravely as she spoke. Then a smile slowly broadened her mouth.