t, "But I don't
know that I blame her. Nothing would have stopped _me_."

"And is there anything else I can do? Has she a pleasant place to
stay?"

"Good enough, I fancy. It's a boarding-house where several people I
know have been. She must be left to her own devices, now. That's the
best thing for her. It's the only thing."

XII.

In spite of his theory as to what was best for her, in some ways Ludlow
rather expected that Cornelia would apply to him for advice as to how
and where she should begin work. He forgot how fully he had already
given it; but she had not. She remembered what she had overheard him
say to her mother, that day in the Fair House, about the superiority of
the Synthesis of Studies, and she had since confirmed her faith in his
judgment by much silent inquiry of the newspapers. They had the Sunday
edition of the _Lakeland Light_ at Pymantoning, and Cornelia had kept
herself informed of the "Gossip of the Ateliers," and concerning "Women
and Artists," "Artists' Summer Homes," "Phases of Studio Life," "The
Ladies who are Organizing Ceramic Clubs," "Women Art Students,"
"Glimpses of the Dens of New York Women Artists," and other aesthetic
interests which the Sunday edition of the _Light_ purveyed with the
newspaper syndicate's generous and indiscriminate abundance. She did
not believe it all; much of it seemed to her very silly; but she
nourished her ambition upon it all the same.

The lady writers who celebrated the lady artists, and who mostly
preferred to swim in seas of personal float, did now and then offer
their readers a basis of solid fact; and they all agreed that the
Synthesis of Art Studies was the place for a girl if she was in earnest
and wished to work.

As these ladies described them the conditions were of the exacting sort
which Cornelia's nature craved, and she had her sex-pride in the
Synthesis, too, because she had read that women had borne an important
part in founding it; the strictest technical training and the freest
spirit of artistic endeavor prevailed in a school that owed its
existence so largely to them. That was a great point, even if every one
of the instructors was a man. She supposed that Mr. Ludlow would have
sheltered himself behind this fact if she had used the other to justify
herself in going on with art after he had urged that as a woman, she
had better not do so. But the last thing Cornelia intended was to
justify herself to Mr. Ludlow, and she veheme