all mapped out. Does it scare you?"

"I guess if it does I shall live through it," said Cornelia steadily;
her heart was beginning to quake somewhat, but she was all the more
determined not to show it.

"Well, the third year you may get to painting still-life, while you
keep up your drawing afternoons here. The next year you'll go into the
antique class, if they'll let you, and draw heads, and keep up your
still-life mornings. When they think you're fit for it, they'll let you
do an arm, maybe, and work along that way to the full figure; and that
takes another whole winter. Then you go into the life class, one of
them, all the morning, and keep drawing from the antique in the
afternoons, or else do heads from the model. You do a head every day,
and then paint it out, and begin another the next day. You learn to
sacrifice self to art. It's grand! Well, then, the next winter you keep
on just the same, and as many winters after that as you please. You
know what one instructor said to a girl that asked him what she should
do after she had been five years in the Synthesis?"

"No, I don't," answered Cornelia anxiously.

"Stay five years more!"

Miss Maybough did not give this time to sink very deep into Cornelia's
spirit. "Will you let me call you by your first name?"

"Why, I've hardly ever been called by any other," said Cornelia simply.

"And will you call me Charmian?"

"I had just as lief." Cornelia laughed; she could not help it; that
girl seemed so odd; she did not know whether she liked her or not.

"What poise you _have_ got!" sighed Charmian. "May I come to see you?
Not a ceremonious call. In your own room; where we can talk."

Cornelia thought that if they went on as they had that day, they should
probably talk quite enough at the Synthesis; but she said, "Why, yes, I
should like to have you, if you won't care for my sitting on the trunk.
There's only one chair."

"Let _me_ have the trunk! Promise me you'll let me sit on the trunk.
It's divine! Is it in a Salvation Hotel?"

"What do you mean?" asked Cornelia.

"Why, that's what they call the places that the Young Women's Christian
Association keep."

"No, it isn't. It's just a boarding-house." Cornelia wrote her address
on a piece of paper, and Charmian received it with solemn rapture. She
caught Cornelia in a sudden embrace and kissed her, before Cornelia
could help herself. "Oh, I adore you!" she cried.

They parted at the head of the stairs, w