did not want to die, that no one wanted to die less than he did,
but he thought he would sooner die than go on teaching. He had
made some reputation and had orders that would carry him on for
some years, and he was going where he could execute them, to where
there were models, to where there was art, to where there was the
joy of life, out of a damp religious atmosphere in which nothing
flourished but the religious vocation.

"Good Heavens! How happy I was yesterday, full of hope and
happiness, my statue finished, and I had arranged to meet Harding
in Rome. The blow had fallen in the night. Who had done this? Who
had destroyed it?"

He fell into a chair, and sat helpless like his own lay figure. He
sat there like one on whom some stupor had fallen, and he was as
white as one of the casts; the charwoman had never seen anyone
give way like that before, and she withdrew very quietly.

In a little while he got up and mechanically kicked the broken
pieces of plaster aside. The charwoman was right, they had broken
his sleeping girl: that did not matter much, but the beautiful
slenderness, the grace he had caught from Lucy's figure--those
slendernesses, those flowing rhythms, all these were gone; the
lovely knees were ugly clay. Yes, there was the ruin, the ignoble
ruin, and he could not believe in it; he still hoped he would wake
and find he had been dreaming, so difficult is it to believe that
the living have turned to clay.

In front of him there was the cheval glass, and overcome though he
was by misfortune he noticed that he was a small, pale, wiry, and