There was an artist gazing
entranced on the picture his wet brush seemed to have that
moment completed, a general dying on a field where Victory had
planted the standard he loved, and these things were not pictures,
but the truest truths, alive, and, as anyone could see, immortal.
Many other pictures there were that these arches framed. And all
showed some moment when life had sprung to fire and flower the
best that the soul of man could ask or man's destiny grant. And the
really good hotel had its place here too, because there are some
souls that ask no higher thing of life than "a really good hotel" .
"Oh, I am glad we came; I am, I am!" Kathleen murmured, and
held fast to her brother's hand.
They went slowly up the hall, the ineffectual bull's-eye, held by
Jimmy, very crooked indeed, showing almost as a shadow in this
big, glorious light.
And then, when the hall's end was almost reached, the children
saw where the light came from. It glowed and spread itself from
one place, and in that place stood the one statue that Mabel "did
not know where to find" the statue of Psyche. They went on,
slowly, quite happy, quite bewildered. And when they came close
to Psyche they saw that on her raised hand the ring showed dark.
Gerald let go Kathleen's hand, put his foot on the pediment, his
knee on the pedestal. He stood up, dark and human, beside the
white girl with the butterfly wings.
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