"Lunch time!" repeated David, warmly. "I'm aiming to survive till at least five minutes after! Think of all the good things we're going to massacre. Where does Elinor want to go, Miss Pat? She didn't nominate it in her note!"
"We all want to go to the same place we had such fun in last spring, when we thought we were so rich," said Judith quickly. "Elinor said you were to have first choice, though, as it was your treat."
"Litz-Tarlton, wasn't it?" asked David. "O.K. for me, and Tommy is a good-natured brute, who doesn't care where he feeds, so that he feeds."
They found the usual array of aproned students in the corridors and work rooms, and although the boys tried to be enthusiastic it was plain that the famous Academy did not appeal to them very strongly.
"Pretty smelly sort of a place, isn't it?" said Tom Hughes to Patricia, with great cheerfulness. "I suppose you get awfully mussed up with that clay, too. Isn't it hard to work in?"
Patricia, though a bit disappointed, felt delightfully superior as she replied loftily, "It isn't so bad. We don't mind, you know, because we're so interested in the work."
They all stood around on the sloppy floor of the clay room as she undid the moist wrappings of her half-finished head. As the cloths were laid aside, there was a disheartening silence.
"It looks sort of whopper-jawed, doesn't it, Miss Pat?" asked David, hesitating. "I can see it's going to be a stunner when it's done, but I guess I'm weak on sculpture anyway. I can't understand it in the green stage."
"It looks like a foreigner, all right," ventured Tom Hughes, and was rewarded for his courage by a flash of passionate gratitude from Patricia's big gray eyes.
"He's a Russian refugee," she said, triumphantly, and as she quickly covered her work again, and they passed out through the little side entrance, she told them the tragic scrap of the model's history that had sifted through the gossip of the work room.