"As a sort of make-weight!" I echoed indignantly; and then, more calmly, "Popplewell's finished, isn't he?"
"Yes--gone to be cast; and then comes the marble."
"Oh, Popplewell's to be done in marble, is he? What shall _I_ be done in?"
Wilkinson was taking an upward view of my features now, with a look of extreme distaste on his countenance.
"You? Oh, if I decide to finish you, it'll be just the clay-burnt terra-cotta, you know. Tut, tut, tut!"
"No offence, old chap, but you _have_ such queer facial bones;" and as he turned back to his modelling I heard him mutter: "You never really know what people are like till they sit to you."
Again I felt a bit hurt, and this time I indulged a retort. "Wonder if you'll get Popplewell into the Academy. You've never had anything in yet, have you?"
"We sculptors are so vilely handicapped by the wretched amount of space the Academy people give us!" said Wilkinson angrily. "Still, I've great hopes this time. Not only is my work improved, but it's a popular subject--Popplewell, the novelist. There--that'll do for to-day. I've got the construction all right," looking resentfully from the clay head to mine, "though no one would believe it who hadn't your head here to compare it with."
"Why, what's the matter with my head?" I asked irritably as I got gingerly off the movable throne. "And, anyhow, I didn't ask to be modelled. You made me sit here--I didn't want to do it."
"Oh, people make practice for one, whatever they're like."
At the second sitting I tried to make allowances for the artistic temperament when Wilkinson prowled round me with a look of something like horror on his face, assaulted my features with compasses, and turned away gibbering. I even kept calm when informed that one of my eyes was considerably larger and wider open than the other and that I had "no drawing" in my face. "No offence, old chap," added my former friend with a grin. "You must remember it's the artist-eye that's responsible for these cursory reflections."
"I wonder," I remarked musingly, "whether the artist-eye is a feature that occasionally gets blacked by an indignant sitter."
At the third and fourth sittings more bitter so-called truths were handed out to me, and he was down on my "construction" like a hundred of bricks.
