Before noon she had passed the criticism needed for this, and was in the lowest grade of the Preparatory. But she was a student at the Synthesis, and she was there to work in the way that those who knew best bade her. She wished to endure hardness, and the more hardness the better.
XIII.
Cornelia found herself in the last of a long line of sections or stalls which flanked a narrow corridor dividing the girl students from the young men, who were often indeed hardly more than boys. There was a table stretching from this corridor to a window looking down on the roofs of some carpenter shops and stables; on the board before her lay the elementary shape of a hand in plaster, which she was trying to draw. At her side that odd-looking girl, who had stared so at her on the stairs the day before, was working at a block foot, and not getting it very well. She had in fact given it up for the present and was watching Cornelia's work and watching her face, and talking to her.
"What is your name?" she broke off to ask, in the midst of a monologue upon the social customs and characteristics of the Synthesis.
Cornelia always frowned, and drew her breath in long sibilations, when she was trying hard to get a thing right. She now turned a knotted forehead on her companion, but stopped her hissing to ask, "What?" Then she came to herself and said, "Oh! Saunders."
"I don't mean your last name," said the other, "I mean your first name."
"Cornelia," said the owner of it, as briefly as before.
"I should have thought it would have been Gladys," the other suggested.
Cornelia looked up in astonishment and some resentment. "Why in the world should my name be Gladys?" she demanded.