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 statues he had just seen in the rue La Boétie, he had come away with a sincere admiration for the solidity of their structure, the harmony and equilibrium of their intricate planes.

This, thought Grover, is the house to which Olga was hurrying the day she tore her stocking. Hellgren was preceding Mamie and himself up a narrow stairway toward a balcony from which they looked down and up and around into the biggest atelier Grover had ever seen. The little house they had entered was as deceptive as a theatre, so small from the outside, so resoundingly big within. When Hellgren spoke, in his loud Swedish French, the walls took up his phrases and flung them back to the slender balcony. Before them were great figures in marble and plaster, encased in scaffoldings. Beside them Hellgren's assistants looked like flies. Thick white dust coated everything, including the windows which stretched from floor to ceiling and across half the roof.

Of Olga there was no sign, and for the next half hour, as he wandered with Mamie through this disciplined quarry, uttering half sincere, half obligatory comments, thinking that if he stayed here long enough he would feel himself a plinth supporting on his own head the incalculable tons of Hellgren's inspirations, Grover wondered where Olga was, whether she would come, whether he might have to continue this fatiguing campaign for weeks and weeks before it bore any sign of fruit.