r the sake of the murky
fumes and the wreaths of dusky crimson flame, which she said it was so
weird to sit by.

In all matters of artistic theory and practice she set Cornelia the
example of grovelling at the master's feet, as if there could be no
question of anything else; but in other things Cornelia sometimes
asserted herself against this slavish submission with a kind of
violence little short of impertinence. After these moral paroxysms, in
which she disputed the most obviously right and reasonable things, she
was always humiliated and cast down before his sincerity in trying to
find a meaning in her difference from him, as if he could not imagine
the nervous impulse that carried her beyond the bounds of truth, and
must accuse himself of error. When this happened she would not let
Charmian take her to task for her behavior; she would not own that she
was wrong; she put the blame on him, and found him arrogant and
patronizing. She had always known he was that kind of person, and she
did not mean to be treated like a child in everything, even if he was a
genius.

By this time they were far away from that point in Charmian's romance
where the faithful friend of the heroine remains forever constant to
her vow not to speak to the heroine of the hero's passion for her, and
in fact rather finds it a duty to break her vow, and enjoys being
snubbed for it. As the transaction of the whole affair took place in
Charmian's fancy, Cornelia had been obliged to indulge her in it, with
the understanding that she should not let it interfere with their work,
or try to involve her visibly or palpably in it.

With all their idling they had days when they worked intensely, and
Ludlow was as severe with Cornelia's work as he was with his own. He
made her rub out and paint out, and he drew ruthless modifications of
her work all over it, like the crudest of the Synthesis masters. He
made her paint out every day the work of the day before, as they did in
the Synthesis; though sometimes he paused over it in a sort of puzzle.
Once he said, holding her sketch into the light he wanted, at the close
of the afternoon, "If I didn't know you had done that to-day, I should
say it was the one you had done yesterday."

Toward the end of the month he recurred to this notion again.
"Suppose," he said, "we keep this, and you do another to-morrow."

The next day he said, in the same perplexity, "Well, keep this, and do
another."

After a week he t