“I see,” he remarked, “that you have quite a number of masks moulded from life, or death. Do I understand that they were not commissions?”
“Very few of them were,” Marion replied. “Most of them were taken from professional models, but some from acquaintances whom my father bribed with the gift of a duplicate mask.”
“But why did he make them? They could not have been used for producing wax faces for the show figures; for you could hardly turn a shop window into a wax-work exhibition with lifelike portraits of real persons.”
“No,” Marion agreed, “that wouldn’t do at all. These masks were principally used for reference as to details of features when my father was modelling a head in clay. But he did sometimes make moulds for the wax from these masks, only he obliterated the likeness, so that the wax face was not a portrait.”
“By working on the wax, I suppose?”
“Yes; or more usually by altering the mask before making the mould. It is quite easy to alter a face. Let me show you.”
She lifted one of the masks from its peg and laid it on the table.
“You see,” she said, “that this is the face of a young girl—one of my father’s models. It is a round, smooth, smiling face, with a very short, weak chin and a projecting upper lip. We can change all that in a moment.”
She took up a lump of clay and, pinching off a pellet, laid it on the right cheek-bone and spread it out. Having treated the other side in the same manner, she rolled an elongated pellet, with which she built up the lower lip. Then, with a larger pellet, she enlarged the chin downwards and forwards, and, having added a small touch to each of the eyebrows, she dipped a sponge in thick clay-water, or “slip,” and dabbed the mask all over to bring it to a uniform colour.
“There,” she said, “it is very rough, but you see what I mean.”