I stood silently before the statue, lost in admiration. I could not conceive it possible that the fragile little hand of the woman who stood beside me could have executed such a perfect work. She had depicted "Evening" as a beautiful nude female figure in the act of stepping forward on tip-toe; the eyes were half closed, and the sweet mouth slightly parted in a dreamily serious smile. The right forefinger was laid lightly on the lips, as though suggesting silence; and in the left hand was loosely clasped a bunch of poppies. That was all. But the poetry and force of the whole conception as carried out in the statue was marvellous.
"Do you like it?" asked Zara, half timidly.
"Like it!" I exclaimed. "It is lovely--wonderful! It is worthy to rank with the finest Italian masterpieces."
"Oh, no!" remonstrated Zara; "no, indeed! When the great Italian sculptors lived and worked--ah! one may say with the Scriptures, 'There were giants in those days.' Giants--veritable ones; and we modernists are the pigmies. We can only see Art now through the eyes of others who came before us. We cannot create anything new. We look at painting through Raphael; sculpture through Angelo; poetry through Shakespeare; philosophy through Plato. It is all done for us; we are copyists. The world is getting old--how glorious to have lived when it was young! But nowadays the very children are blase."
"And you--are not you blase to talk like that, with your genius and all the world before you?" I asked laughingly, slipping my arm through hers. "Come, confess!"
Zara looked at me gravely.
"I sincerely hope the world is NOT all before me," she said; "I should be very sorry if I thought so. To have the world all before you in the general acceptation of that term means to live long, to barter whatever genius you have for gold, to hear the fulsome and unmeaning flatteries of the ignorant, who are as ready with condemnation as praise--to be envied and maligned by those less lucky than you are. Heaven defend me from such a fate!"
She spoke with earnestness and solemnity; then, dropping the curtain before her statue, turned away. I was admiring the vine-wreathed head of a young Bacchante that stood on a pedestal near me, and was about to ask Zara what subject she had chosen for the large veiled figure at the farthest end of her studio, when we were interrupted by the entrance of the little Greek page whom I had seen on my first visit to the house. He saluted us both, and addressing himself to Zara, said: "Monsieur le Comte desires me to tell you, madame, that Prince Ivan will be present at dinner."