"I don't see what you want with models," said a very young and shy boy student. "Couldn't you pose for each other, and—"
A murmur of dissent from the others drove him back into shy silence.
"No amateur models in this Academy," said Miss Voscoe. "Oh, we'll make the time-honoured institutions sit up with the work we'll do. Let's all pledge ourselves to send in to the Salon—or anyway to the Indépendants! What we're suffering from in this quarter's git-up-and-git. Why should we be contented to be nobody?"
"On the contrary," said Vernon, "Miss Voscoe is everybody—almost!"
"I'm the nobody who can't get a word in edgeways anyhow," she said. "What I've been trying to say ever since I was born—pretty near—is that what this class wants is a competent Professor, some bully top-of-the-tree artist, to come and pull our work all to pieces and wipe his boots on the bits. Mr. Vernon, don't you know any one who's pining to give us free crits?"
"Temple is," said Vernon. "There's no mistaking that longing glance of his."
"As a competent professor I make you my bow of gratitude," said Temple, "but I should never have the courage to criticise the work of nine fair ladies."
"You needn't criticise them all at once," said a large girl from Minneapolis, "nor yet all in the gaudy eye of heaven. We'll screen off a corner for our Professor—sort of confessional business. You sit there and we'll go to you one by one with our sins in our hand."
"That would scare him some I surmise," said Miss Voscoe.
"Not at all," said Temple, a little nettled, he hardly knew why.