As he left the foundry he repeated his injunction about the care of the moulds, and his personal tenderness for the bronze creatures was so keen that he did not appreciate the significant fact that he was treated with scant respect. He stepped in at the Field palace on the way up-town, and a man in an official cap at the door asked him for his card of admission.
"Card of admission? Why, I'm one of the decorators here.... I reckon you're new, my boy. I only quit working a fortnight ago."
He was nervous and pale; his clothes were shabby.
"Sorry," returned the man, "my orders are strict from Mr. Cedersholm himself. Nobody comes in without his card."
The sculptor ground his heel on the cruel stones.
He had been shut away by his concentrated work in Cedersholm's studio from outside interests. He had no friends in New York but the children. No friend but his aunt, who had borrowed of him nearly all he possessed, no sympathizers but the little old ladies, no consolations but his visions. In the May evenings, now warm, he sat on a bench in Central Park, listlessly watching the wind in the young trees and the voices of happy children on their way to the lake with their boats. He began to have a proper conception of his own single-handed struggle. He began to know what it is, without protection or home or any capital, to grapple with life first-hand.
"Why, art is the longest way in the world," he thought. "It's the rudest and steepest, and to climb it successfully needs colossal genius, as well as the other things, and it needs money."
He went slowly back to his lodging and his hall room. Along the wall his array of boots, all in bad condition—his unequal boots and his deformity struck him and his failure. A mist rose before his eyes. Over by the mirror he had pinned the sketch he liked the best.
On Sunday afternoon, in his desire to see the children, he forgot his distaste of meeting the master of the house, and rang the bell at an hour when Carew was likely to be at home. He had, too, for the first time, a wish to see the man who had made a success of his own life. Whatever