a book of models from the desk, and began to turn its slick pages. They showed modest blocks of Georgia marble and Vermont granite.
“I don’t want any of those,” she said impatiently. “I’ve already made up my mind. I know what I want.”
He looked up surprised. “What is it?”
“I want the angel out front.”
His face was shocked and unwilling. He gnawed the corner of his thin lip. No one knew how fond he was of the angel. Publicly he called it his White Elephant. He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it. For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain. It was now brown and fly-specked. But it had come from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy.
In his rages, Gant sometimes directed vast climaxes of abuse at the angel. “Fiend out of Hell!” he roared. “You have impoverished me, you have ruined me, you have cursed my declining years, and now you will crush me to death, fearful, awful, and unnatural monster that you are.”
But sometimes when he was drunk he fell weeping on his knees before it, called it Cynthia, and entreated its love, forgiveness, and blessing for its sinful but repentant boy. There was laughter from the Square.
“What’s the matter?” said Elizabeth. “Don’t you want to sell it?”
“It will cost you a good deal, Elizabeth,” he said evasively.
“I don’t care,” she answered, positively. “I’ve got the money. How much do you want?”
He was silent, thinking for a moment of the place where the angel stood. He knew he had nothing to cover or obliterate that place— it left a barren crater in his heart.
“All right,” he said. “You can have it for what I paid for it— $420.”
She took a thick sheaf of banknotes from her purse and counted the money out for him. He pushed it back.
