Antony seemed entirely unmoved by this picture. "I think I shall go to Rome, Bob," he began, then cried: "No, I mean to St. Petersburg."
"It will be less expensive," Dearborn suggested dryly, "and considerably less travel, not to go to the Bois de Boulogne."
"I shall finish this portrait this week," Fairfax went on. "Now I can't scrape it out and begin again. I have done it twice. It would be desecration, for it's mightily like her, and my reason for my going there is over."
"Well, how about that full-length figure of her in furs and velvets, holding a little statuette in her hands, that you used to rave about doing? If at first you make a bas-relief, begin and begin again! There are busts and statues, as there are odes and sonnets and curtain-raisers and five-act tragedies."
"Yes," returned Fairfax, "there are tragedies, no doubt about it."
Fairfax, smoking, struggled with the emotions rising in him and which he had no notion of betraying to his friend. In the corner where Dearborn had rolled it, for he made the whole studio pretty much his own now, was the statue Fairfax was making of his mother. It was covered with a white cloth which took the lines and form of the head and shoulders. It stood ghostly amongst the shadows of the room and near it, on a stool, were Antony's
sculpting tools, his broad wooden knives and a barrel of plaster. His gaze wandered to these inanimate objects, nothing in themselves, but which suggested and made possible and real his art—the reason for his existence. Now, when he stopped modelling Mrs. Faversham, he would go on with the bust of his mother. He turned his eyes to Dearborn.
"I have been up there for five weeks; I have been entertained there like a friend; I have eaten and drunk; I have accepted her hospitality; I have gone with her to the plays and opera. I have pretty well lived on her money."
"All men of the world do that," Dearborn said reasonably. "It's an awfully nice thing for a woman to have a handsome young man whom she can call on when she likes."
Fairfax ignored this and went on. "I have met her friends, delightful and distinguished people, who have invited me to their houses. I have never gone, not once, not even to see Potowski. Now I shall go up next Sunday and finish my work, and then I'm going away."