"You have humor, too," said Miss Maybough, thoughtfully, as if she had been mentally cataloguing her characteristics. "You'll be popular."
Cornelia stared at her and turned to her drawing.
"But you're proud," said the other, "I can see that. I adore pride. It must have been your pride that fascinated me at the first glance. Do you mind my being fascinated with you?"
Cornelia wanted to laugh; at the same time she wondered what new kind of crazy person she had got with; this was hardly one of the art-students that went wild from overwork. Miss Maybough kept on without waiting to be answered: "I haven't got a bit of pride, myself. I could just let you walk over me. How does it feel to be proud? What are you proud for?"
Cornelia quieted a first impulse to resent this pursuit. "I don't think I'm very proud. I used to be proud when I was little;—I guess you ought to have asked me then."
"Oh, yes! Tell me about yourself!" Miss Maybough implored again, but she went on as before without giving Cornelia any chance to reply. "Of course, when I say mamma, I mean my step-mother. She's very good to me, but she doesn't understand me. You'll like her. I'll tell you what sort of a person she is." She did so at such length that the lunch hour passed before she finished, and a hush fell upon all the babbling voices about, as the monitor came back to her place.
Toward the end of the afternoon the monitor's vigilance relaxed again, and Miss Maybough began to talk again. "If you want to be anything by the Synthesis standards," she said, "you've got to keep this up a whole year, you know." It was now four o'clock, and Cornelia had been working steadily since eleven, except for the half-hour at lunch-time. "They'll see how well you draw; you needn't be afraid of their not doing that; and they'll let you go on to the round at once, perhaps. But if you're truly Synthetic in spirit, you won't want to. You'll want to get all you can out of the block; and it'll take you a year to do that; then another year for the full length, you know. At first we only had the block here, and a good many people think now that the full length Preparatory encroaches on the Antique. Sometimes they even let you put in backgrounds here, but it don't matter much: when the instructor in the Antique gets hold of you he makes you unlearn everything you've learnt in the full-length. He's grand."
A girl who was working at the other end of the table said with a careless air, "They told me I might go up to the Antique to-day."
"Lida!" Miss Maybough protested, in a voice hoarse with admiration.
"Yes; but I'm not going."