her work in
round hands and she did not think it was better than she could do
herself. She took courage and dreamed of trying not to disappoint the
hopes of immediate performance, which she knew her mother would be
having in spite of her pretending the contrary. Her mother had written
that she must not work herself down, trying to learn too fast, but must
take the whole winter for it. Cornelia wondered what she would think if
she knew how little a person could be expected to do in one winter, in
the regular Synthesis way.

She was happier at the end of the first week than she had been at the
end of the first day, though she was very tired, and was glad to stop
at the earlier hour when most of the students left their work on
Saturday afternoon. She had begun to feel the charm of the Synthesis,
which every one said she would feel. She was already a citizen of the
little republic where the heaviest drudgery was sweet with a vague,
high faith and hope. It was all a strange happiness to her, and yet not
strange. It was like a heritage of her own that she had come into;
something she was born to, a right, a natural condition.

She did not formulate this, or anything; she did not ask herself why
the frivolities and affectations which disgusted her in the beginning
no longer offended her so much; she only saw that some of the most
frivolous and affected of her fellow-citizens were the cleverest; and
that the worst of them were better than they might have been where the
ideal was less generous. She did not know then or afterwards just why
some of them were there, and they did not seem to know themselves.
There were some who could reasonably expect to live by their art; there
were more who could hope to live by teaching it. But there were others
who had no definite aim or purpose, and seemed to think their study
would shape them to some design. They were trying it, they did not know
clearly why, or at least were not able to say clearly why. There were
several rich girls, and they worked from the love of it, as hard as the
poorest. There were some through whom she realized what Ludlow meant
when he spoke to her mother of the want that often went hand in hand
with art; there were others even more pitiful, who struggled with the
bare sufficiency of gift to keep within the Synthesis. But even among
the girls who were so poor that they had to stint themselves of food
and fire, for art's sake, there were the bravest and gayest spirit