"Are you sure—quite sure? If you are—I will do what you wish."
He sprang up buoyant, transfigured.
"If I win it will be you!" he said. "Could you come into the studio a moment? I'll show you the two sketches I have made for 'Soul' and 'Body'."
On the prospect of a chance—the chance that had come at last—he was completely forgetting that she must be prepared to comprehend what he required of her; he forgot that she could know nothing of a sculptor's ways and methods of production. On the way to the studio, however, he tardily remembered, and it rather scared him.
"Do you know any painters or sculptors?" he asked, keeping impatient pace beside her.
"I know a woman who makes casts of hands and arms," she said shyly. "She stopped me in the street once and asked permission to cast my hands. Would you call her a sculptor?"
"N—well, perhaps she may be. We sculptors often use casts of the human body." He plunged into it more frankly: "You know, of course, that to become a sculptor or a painter, one has to model and paint from living people."
"Yes," she said, undisturbed.
"And," he continued, "it would be impossible for a sculptor to produce the beautiful marbles you have seen—er—around—unless he could pose a living model to copy from."