here they found themselves
among groups of students arriving from all parts of the place, and
pausing for Synthesis gossip, which Cornelia could not have entered
into yet if she had wished. She escaped, and walked home to her
boarding-house with rather a languid pace, and climbed to her little
room on the fifth story, and lay down on her bed. It was harder work
than teaching, and her back ached, and her heart was heavy with the
thought of five years in the Synthesis, when she barely had money
enough for one winter. She was not afraid of the work; she liked that;
she would be glad to spend her whole life at it; but she could not give
five years to it, and perhaps ten. She was ashamed now to think she had
once dreamed of somehow slipping through in a year, and getting the
good of it without working for it. She tried to plan how she could go
home and teach a year, and then come back and study a year, and so on;
but by the end of the twenty years that it would take for ten years'
study at this rate, she would be an old woman of forty, ready to drop
into the grave. She was determined not to give up, and if she did not
give up, there was no other end to it; or so it seemed at the close of
her first day in the Synthesis.

She was very homesick, and she would have liked to give up altogether
and go home. But she thought of what people would say; of how her
mother, who would be so glad to see her, would feel. She would not be a
baby, and she turned her face over in the pillow and sobbed.

XV.

Cornelia thought that perhaps Mr. Ludlow would feel it due to Mrs.
Burton to come and ask how she was getting on; but if she did not wish
him to come she had reason to be glad, for the whole week passed, and
she did not see him, or hear anything from him. She did not blame him,
for she had been very uncouth, and no doubt he had done his whole duty
in meeting her at the depot, and seeing her safely housed the first
night. She wished to appreciate his kindness, and when she found
herself wondering a little at his not caring to know anything more
about her, she made much of it. If it was not all that she could have
imagined from his offer to be of use to her in any way he could, she
reminded herself that he had made that offer a very long time ago, and
that she never meant to use him. Beside, she was proud of having made
her start alone, and she knew which way she wished to go, though the
way seemed so hard and long at times. She w