A Beauty Comes Home

London Art Dealer Gustav Delbanco picked up his telephone one day last week, heard a man's voice: "If you go to Room 24 in the Victoria and Albert Museum, you will find something." Delbanco promptly dispatched a messenger, who found something all right-- the small (13-in.) Rodin bronze, Psyche, which was stolen four months ago. Tucked under the figurine was an envelope containing a letter and a ten-shilling note ($1.40). The letter started with some lines from W. B. Yeats's The Living Beauty:

I bade, because the wick and oil are

spent And frozen are the channels of the

blood,

My discontented heart to draw content From beauty that is cast out of a mould In bronze . . .

The note continued: "There was no mercenary intent behind my abduction of this exquisite creature. I merely wished to live with her for a while. Auguste Rodin would have understood. The enclosed towards Le Baiser* is all I can afford. An Impecunious Art Student."

At week's end, Psyche was back at her place in Delbanco's shop, this time wired securely to her pedestal.

* Another Rodin work for whose purchase the Tate Gallery is raising a public subscription.

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