Tears of self-pity came into her eyes. She was slipping back again into her former mood. With his gaze he caught and held hers, exerting all his will to hold it. A brother psychologist seeing him in that moment would have said that to this man a possible way out of a dilemma had come—would have said that an inspiration suddenly had visited him.
“Perhaps you would like to see it at closer range,” he said, still steadfastly regarding her. “There is a story regarding it—a story that might interest you, madam.”
He rose from his place, crossed the room and, reaching up, took down a plaster cast of a face that rested upright against the broad low moulding that ran along his walls on two sides.
As he brought it to her he saw that she had taken a chair. Her figure was relaxed from its recent rigidness. Her elbows were upon the tabletop. He put the cast into her gloved hands and reseated himself. She held it before her at arm's length, and one gloved hand went over its surface almost caressingly.
“It is wonderful!” she said. “I never saw such an expression on any human face—why, it is soothing to me just to look at it. Doctor, where did you get it? Who was the original of it—or don't you know? What living creature sat for the artist who made it?”
“No living creature sat for it,” he said slowly.
“Oh!” she said disappointedly. “Well, then, what artist had the imagination to conjure up such a conception?”
“No artist conjured it up,” he told her.
“Then how-”
“That, madam,” he said, “is a death mask.”