“I loathe and adore you!” it came; and then I looked round, awfully startled to hear myself saying that.

But he didn’t look at me.  He only nodded.

“Yes.  Of good and evil too—­” he muttered to himself.  And then all of a sudden he got up and went out.

I didn’t sleep for ever so long after that, thinking how odd it was I should have said that.

Well (to get on), after that something I couldn’t account for began to come over me sometimes as I worked.  It began to come over me, without any warning, that he was thinking of me down there across the yard.  I used to know (this must sound awfully silly to you) that he was down yonder, thinking of me and doing something to me.  And one night I was so sure that it wasn’t fancy that I jumped straight up from my work, and I’m not quite sure what happened then, until I found myself in his studio, just as if I’d walked there in my sleep.

And he seemed to be waiting for me, for there was a chair by his own, in front of the statue.

“What is it, Benlian?” I burst out.

“Ah!” he said....  “Well, it’s about that arm, Pudgie; I want you to tell me about the arm.  Does it look so strange as it did?”

“No,” I said.

“I thought it wouldn’t,” he observed.  “But I haven’t touched it, Pudgie—­”

So I stayed the evening there.

But you must not think he was always doing that thing—­whatever it was—­to me.  On the other hand, I sometimes felt the oddest sort of release (I don’t know how else to put it) ... like when, on one of these muggy, earthy-smelling days, when everything’s melancholy, the wind freshens up suddenly and you breathe again.  And that (I’m trying to take it in order, you see, so that it will be plain to you) brings me to the time I found out that he did that too, and knew when he was doing it.

I’d gone into his place one night to have a look at his statue.  It was surprising what a lot I was finding out about that statue.  It was still all out of proportion (that is to say, I knew it must be—­remembered I’d thought so—­though it didn’t annoy me now quite so much.  I suppose I’d lost my fresh eye by that time).  Somehow, too, my own miniatures had begun to look a bit kiddish; they made me impatient; and that’s horrible, to be discontented with things that once seemed jolly good to you.

Well, he’d been looking at me in the hungriest sort of way, and I looking at the statue, when all at once that feeling of release and lightness came over me.  The first I knew of it was that I found myself thinking of some rather important letters my firm had written to me, wanting to know when a job I was doing was going to be finished.  I thought myself it was time I got it finished; I thought I’d better set about it at once; and I sat suddenly up in my chair, as if I’d just come out of a sleep.  And, looking at the statue, I saw it as it had seemed at first—­all misshapen and out of drawing.