ice
village girl, with a real but limited gift, go from here to study art
in New York! And get in love there! And married!' Cornelia and her
mother at once stepped out of the inchoate; Ludlow advanced from
another quarter of Chaos, and I began really to be.

"The getting me down on paper was a much later affair--nearly two years
later. There were earlier engagements to be met; there was an exciting
editorial episode to be got behind you; and there was material for a
veridical representation of the ardent young life of the New York
Synthesis of Art Studies to be gathered as nearly at first hands and as
furtively as possible.

"I should be almost ashamed to remind you of the clandestine means you
employed before you were forced to a frankness alien to your nature,
and went and threw yourself on the mercy of a Member who, upon your
avowing your purpose, took you through the schools of the Synthesis and
instructed you in its operation. Not satisfied with this, you got an
undergraduate of the Synthesis to coach you as to its social side, and
while she was consenting to put it all down in writing for your
convenience, you were shamelessly making notes of her boarding-house,
as the very place to have Cornelia come to.

"Your methods were at first so secret and uncandid that I wonder I ever
came to be the innocent book I am; and I feel that the credit is far
less due to you than to the friends who helped you. But I am glad to
remember how you got your come-uppings when, long after, a student of
the Synthesis whom you asked, in your latent vanity, how she thought
that social part of me was managed, answered, 'Well, any one could see
that it was studied altogether from the outside, that it wasn't at all
the _spirit_ of the Synthesis.'

"It was enough almost to make me doubt myself, but I recovered my
belief in my own truth when I reflected that it was merely a just
punishment for you. I could expose you in other points, if I chose, and
show what slight foundations you built my facts and characters upon;
but perhaps that would be ungrateful. You were at least a doting
parent, if not a wise one, and in your fondness you did your best to
spoil me. You gave me two heroines, and you know very well that before
you were done you did not know but you preferred Charmian to Cornelia.
And you had nothing whatever to build Charmian upon, not the slightest
suggestion from life, where you afterwards encountered her Egyptian
profile! I thi