ering blank before her, that she wished
to be treated with severity, and that the criticism she needed was the
criticism that every one dreaded.

When the secretary fastened her application to her drawings, she asked
if she should wait to learn whether it was accepted or not; but he said
that he would send her application to the Members' Room, and the
instructor would see it there in the morning. She would have liked to
ask him if she should come back there to find out, but she was afraid
to do it; he might say no, and then she should not know what to do. She
determined to come without his leave, and the next morning she found
that the master whom they had been submitted to had so far approved her
drawings as to have scrawled upon her application, "Recommended to the
Preparatory." The secretary said the instructor in the Preparatory
would tell her which grade to enter there.

Cornelia's heart danced, but she governed herself outwardly, and asked
through her set teeth, "Can I begin at once?" She had lost one day
already, and she was not going to lose another if she could help it.

The secretary smiled. "If the instructor in the Preparatory will place
you."

Before noon she had passed the criticism needed for this, and was in
the lowest grade of the Preparatory. But she was a student at the
Synthesis, and she was there to work in the way that those who knew
best bade her. She wished to endure hardness, and the more hardness the
better.

XIII.

Cornelia found herself in the last of a long line of sections or stalls
which flanked a narrow corridor dividing the girl students from the
young men, who were often indeed hardly more than boys. There was a
table stretching from this corridor to a window looking down on the
roofs of some carpenter shops and stables; on the board before her lay
the elementary shape of a hand in plaster, which she was trying to
draw. At her side that odd-looking girl, who had stared so at her on
the stairs the day before, was working at a block foot, and not getting
it very well. She had in fact given it up for the present and was
watching Cornelia's work and watching her face, and talking to her.

"What is your name?" she broke off to ask, in the midst of a monologue
upon the social customs and characteristics of the Synthesis.

Cornelia always frowned, and drew her breath in long sibilations, when
she was trying hard to get a thing right. She now turned a knotted
forehead on her c