dropped before it; dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor;
canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes:
these features one might notice anywhere. But, besides, there was a
bookcase with an unusual number of books in it, and there was an open
colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned, with
foreign periodicals--French and English--littering its leaf, and some
pages of manuscript scattered among them. Above all, there was a
sculptor's revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling,
with an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the
head of the old man who sat on the platform beside it.

Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to
advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have
more than one. But they are apparently immensely interested as well as
distracted by them. When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed,
up to a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper
expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point,
he would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist,
and supremely a colorist. At the certain point in either art he was apt
to break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other.
In these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very
striking, very original, very chic, very everything but habitable.
It was in this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had
at first approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory of
architecture. But it had grown in his respect till he maintained that
the accessory business ought to be all the other way: that temples should
be raised to enshrine statues, not statues made to ornament temples; that
was putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance. This was when he
had carried a plastic study so far that the sculptors who saw it said
that Beaton might have been an architect, but would certainly never be a