At the Gare de Lyon, Colin put his master safely into his coupe-lit, and then wandered along the train looking out for a carriage into which he might install himself comfortably for the long journey. All the carriages, as on all French express trains, were first-class; and Colin soon picked one out for himself, with a vacant place next the window. He jumped in and took his seat; and in two minutes more the train was off, and he found himself, at last, beyond the possibility of a doubt, on his way to Rome.
Rome, Rome, Rome! how the very name seemed to bound and thrill through Colin Churchill\'s inmost nature! He looked at the little book of coupon tickets which his master had given him; yes, there it was, as clear as daylight, \'Paris, P.L.M., à Rome;\' not a doubt about it. Rome, Rome, Rome! It had seemed a dream, a fancy, hitherto; and now it was just going to be converted into an actual living reality. He could hardly believe even now that he would ever get there. Would there be an accident at the summit level of the Mont Cenis tunnel, to prevent his ever reaching the goal of his ambition? It almost seemed as if there must be some hitch somewhere, for the idea of actually getting to Rome—that Rome that Cicolari had long ago told him was the capital of art—seemed too glorious and magnificent to be really true, for Colin Churchill.
For a while, the delightful exhilaration of knowing that that very carriage in which he sat was actually going straight through to Rome left him little room to notice the faces or personalities of his fellow-travellers. But as they gradually got well outside the Paris ring, and launched into the country towards Fontainebleau, Colin had leisure to look about him and take stock of the companions he was to have on his way southward. Three of them were Frenchmen only going to Lyon and Marseille—only, Colin thought to himself, naively, for he despised anybody now who was bound for anywhere on earth save the city of Michael Angelo and Canova and Thorwaldsen; but the other two were bound, by the labels on their luggage, for Rome itself. One of them was a tall military-looking gentleman, with a grizzled grey moustache, a Colonel somebody, the hat-box said, but the name was covered by a label; the other, apparently his daughter, was a handsome girl of about twenty, largely built and selfpossessed, like a woman who has lived much in the world from her childhood upward. Colin saw at once, that, unlike little Minna (who had essentially a painter\'s face and figure), this graceful full-formed woman was entirely and exquisitely statuesque. The very pose of her arm upon the slight ledge of the window as she leaned out to look at the country was instinct with plastic capabilities. Colin, with his professional interest always uppermost, felt a perfect longing to have up a batch of clay forthwith and model it then and there upon the spot. He watched each new movement and posture so closely, in fact (of course in his capacity as a sculptor only), that the girl herself noticed his evident admiration, and took it sedately like a woman of the world. She didn\'t blush and shrink away timidly, as Minna would have done under the same circumstances (though her skin was many shades lighter than Minna\'s rich brunette complexion, and would have shown the faintest suspicion of a blush, had one been present, far more readily); she merely observed and accepted Colin\'s silent tribute of admiration as her natural due. It made her just a trifle more self-conscious, perhaps, but that was all; indeed, one could hardly say whether even so the somewhat studied attitudes she seemed to be taking up were not really the ones which by long use had become the easiest for her. There are some beautiful women so accustomed to displaying their beauty to the best advantage that they can\'t even throw themselves down on a sofa in their own bedrooms without instinctively and automatically assuming a graceful position for all their limbs.
After a while, they fell into a conversation; and Colin, who was the most innocent and unartificial of men, was amused to find that even he, on the spur of the moment, had arrived at a very obvious, worldly-wise principle upon this subject. Wishing to get into a talk with the daughter, he felt half-unconsciously that it wouldn\'t do to begin by addressing her outright, but that he should first, with seeming guilelessness, attack her father. A man who is travelling with a pretty girl, in whatever relation, doesn\'t like you to begin an acquaintanceship of travel by speaking to her first; he resents your intrusion, and considers you have no right to talk to ladies under his escort. But when you begin by addressing himself, that is quite another matter; lured on by his quiet good sense, or his conversational powers, or his profound knowledge, or whatever else it is that he specially prides himself upon, you are soon launched upon general topics, and then the ladies of the party naturally chime in after a few minutes. To start by addressing him is a compliment to his intelligence or his social qualities; to start by addressing his companion is a distinct slight to himself, at the same time that it displays your own cards far too openly. You can convert him at once either into a valuable ally or into an enemy and a jealous guardian. Of course every other man feels this from his teens; but Colin hadn\'t yet mixed much in the world, and he smiled to himself at his acumen in discovering it at all on the first trial.
\'Beautifully wooded country about here,\' he said at the earliest opportunity the military gentleman gave him by laying down his Times (even in France your Englishman will stick to his paper). \'Not like most of France; so green and fresh-looking. This is Millet\'s country, you know; he always works about the outskirts of Fontainebleau.\'
\'Ah, indeed, does he?\' the colonel responded, having only a very vague idea floating through his mind that Millet or Millais or something of the sort was the name of some painter fellow or other he had somewhere heard about. \'He works about Fontainebleau, does he, now? Dear me! How very interesting!\'
Whenever people dismiss a subject from their minds by saying \'How very interesting!\' you know at once they really mean that it doesn\'t interest them in the slightest degree, and they don\'t want to be bothered by hearing anything more about it; but Colin\'s observations upon mankind and the niceties of the English language had not yet carried him to this point of interpretative science, so he took the colonel literally at his word, and went on enthusiastically (for he was a great admirer of the peasant painter whose story was so like his own), \'Yes, he works at Fontainebleau. It was here, you know, that he painted his Angelus. Have you ever seen the Angelus?\'
The colonel fidgeted about in his seat uneasily, and fumbled in a nervous way with the corner of the Times. \'The Angelus!\' he repeated, meditatively. \'Ah, yes, the Angelus. Gwen, my dear, have we seen Mr. Millet\'s Angelus P Was it in the Academy?\'
\'No, papa,\' Gwen answered, smiling sweetly and composedly. \'We haven\'t seen it, and it wasn\'t in the Academy. M. Millet is the French painter, you remember, the painter who wears sabots. So delightfully romantic, isn\'t it,\' turning to Colin, \'to be a great painter and yet still to wear sabots?\' This was a very cleverly delivered sentence of Miss Gwen\'s, for it was intended first to show that she at least, if not her father, knew who the unknown young artist was talking about (Gwen jumped readily at the conclusion that Colin was an artist), and secondly, to exonerate her papa from culpable ignorance in the artist\'s eyes by gently suggesting that a slight confusion of names sufficiently accounted for his obvious blunder. But it was also, quite unintentionally, delivered point-blank at Colin Churchill\'s tenderest susceptibilities. This grand young lady, then, so calm and selfpossessed, could sympathise with an artist who had risen, and who, even in the days of his comparative prosperity, still wore sabots. To be sure, Colin didn\'t exactly know what sabots were (perhaps the blue blouses which he saw all the French workmen were wearing?), for he was still innocent of all languages but his own, unless one excepts the Italian he had picked up in anticipation from Cicolari; but he guessed at least it was some kind of dress supposed to mark Millet\'s peasant origin, and that was quite enough for him. The grand young lady did not despise an artist who had been born in the ranks of the people.
\'Yes,\' he said warmly, \'it\'s very noble of him. Noble not merely that he has risen to paint such pictures as the Gleaners and the Angelus, but that he isn\'t ashamed now to own the peasant people he has originally sprung from.\'
\'Oh, ah, certainly,\' the colonel replied in a short sharp voice, though the remark was hardly addressed to him. \'Very creditable of the young man, indeed, not to be ashamed of his humble origin. Very creditable. Very creditable. Gwen, my dear, would you like to see the paper?\'
\'No, thank you, papa,\' Gwen answered with another charming smile (fine teeth, too, by Jingo). \'You know I never care to read in a train in motion. Yes, quite a romantic story, this of Millet\'s; and I believe even now he\'s horribly poor, isn\'t he? he doesn\'t sell his pictures.\'
\'The highest art,\' Colin said quietly, \'seldom meets with real recognition during the lifetime of the artist.\'
\'You\'re a painter yourself?\' asked Gwen, looking up at the handsome young man with close interest.
\'Not a painter; a sculptor; and I\'m going to Rome to perfect myself in my art.\'
\'A sculptor—to Rome!\' Gwen repeated to herself. \'Oh, how nice! Why, we\'re going to Rome, too, and we shall be able to go all the way together. I\'m so glad, for I\'m longing to be told all about art and artists.\'
Colin smiled. \'You\'re fond of art, then?\' he asked simply.
\'Fond of it is exactly the word,\' Gwen answered. \'I know very little about it; much less than I should like to do; but I\'m intensely interested in it. And a sculptor, too! Do you know, I\'ve often met lots of painters, but I never before met a sculptor.\'
\'The loss has been theirs,\' Colin put in with professional gravity. \'You would make a splendid model.\'
The young man said it in the innocence of his heart, thinking only what a grand bust of a Semiramis or an Artemisia one might have moulded from Miss Gwen\'s full womanly face and figure; but the observation made the colonel shudder with awe and astonishment on his padded cushions. \'Gwen, my dear,\' he said, feebly interposing for the second time, \'hadn\'t you better change places with me? The draught from the window will be too much for you, I\'m afraid.\'
\'Oh dear no, thank you, papa; not at all. I haven\'t been roasted, you know, for twenty years in the North-West Provinces, till every little breath of air chills me and nips me like a hothouse flower. So you think I would make a good model, do you? Well, that now I call a real compliment, because of course you regard me dispassionately from a sculpturesque point of view. I\'ve been told that a great many faces do quite well enough to paint, but that only very few features are regular and calm enough to be worth a sculptor\'s notice. Is that so, now?\'
\'It is,\' Colin answered, looking straight into her beautiful bold face. \'For example, some gipsy-looking girls, who are very pretty indeed with their brown skins and bright black eyes, and who make exceedingly taking pictures—Esthers, and Cleopatras, and so forth, you know—are quite useless from the plastic point of view: their good looks depend too much upon colour and upon passing shades of expression, while sculpture of course demands that the features should be almost faultlessly perfect and regular in absolute repose.\'
The colonel looked uneasy again, and pulled up his collar nervously. \'Very fine occupation indeed, a sculptor\'s,\' he edged in sideways. \'Delightful faculty to be able to do the living marble and all that kind of thing; very delightful, really.\' The colonel was always equal to a transparent platitude upon every occasion, and contributed very little else to the general conversation at any time.
\'And so delightful, too, to hear an artist talk about his art,\' Gwen added with a touch of genuine enthusiasm. \'Do you know, I think I should love to be a sculptor. I should love even to go about and see the studios, and watch the beautiful things growing under your hands. I should love to have my bust taken, just so as to get to know how you do it all. It must be so lovely to see the shape forming itself slowly out of a raw block of marble.\'
\'Oh, you know, we don\'t do it all in the marble, at first,\' Colin said quickly. \'It\'s rather dirty work, the first modelling. If you come into a sculptor\'s studio when he\'s working in the clay, you\'ll find him all daubed over with bits of mud, just like a common labourer.\'
\'How very unpleasant!\' said the colonel coldly. \'Hardly seems the sort of profession fit for a gentleman—now does it?\'
\'Oh, papa, how can you be so dreadful! Why, it\'s just beautiful. I should love to see it all. I think in some ways sculpture\'s the very finest and noblest art of all—finer and nobler even than painting.\'
\'The Greeks thought so,\' Colin assented with quiet assurance; \'and they say Michael Angelo thought so too. Perhaps I may be prejudiced, but I cer............