as not sure that all the
students at the Synthesis were so clear as to their direction, but they
all had the same faith in the Synthesis and its methods. They hardly
ever talked to her of anything else, and first and last they talked a
good deal to her. It was against the rules to loiter and talk in the
corridors, as much against the rules as smoking; but every now and then
you came upon a young man with a cigarette, and he was nearly always
talking with a group of girls. At lunch-time the steps and window-seats
were full, and the passages were no longer thoroughfares. After the
first day Cornelia came out with the rest; Charmian Maybough said that
one could not get into the spirit of the Synthesis unless one did; and
in fact those who wished to work and those who would rather have
played, as it seemed to her, met there in the same aesthetic equality.
She found herself acquainted with a great many girls whose names she
did not know, in the fervor of the common interest, the perpetual glow
of enthusiasm which crowned the severest ordeals of the Synthesis with
the halo of happy martyrdom if not the wreath of victory.

They talked about the different instructors, how awful they were, and
how they made you cry sometimes, they were so hard on your work; but if
you amounted to anything, you did not mind it when you got to feel what
they meant; then you _wanted_ them to be harsh. They said of one, "My!
You ought to see him! _He_ can spoil your drawing for you! He just
takes your charcoal, and puts thick black lines all over everything. It
don't do to finish much for _him_." They celebrated another for sitting
down in front of your work, and drooping in silent despair before it
for awhile, and then looking up at you in cold disgust, and asking,
"What made you draw it _that_ way?" as if it were inconceivable anybody
should have been willing to do it so. There were other instructors who
were known to have the idea of getting at the best in you by a
sympathetic interest in what you had tried for, and looking for some
good in it. The girls dramatized their manner of doing this; they did
not hold them in greater regard than the harder masters, but they did
not hold them in less, and some of them seemed to value an instructor
as much for the way he squinted his eyes at your drawing as for what he
said of it.

The young men did not talk so much of the instructors; they were more
reticent about everything. But some had formed themselv