es upon them,
and you could tell which each of these was studying under; or this was
what Charmian Maybough said.

She led Cornelia all about through the quaint old rookery, with its
wandering corridors, and its clusters of rooms distributed at random in
the upper stories of several buildings which the Synthesis had gathered
to itself as if by a sort of affinity, and she lectured upon every one
and everything.

It was against usage for students in the lower grades to visit the
upper classes when they were at work; but Charmian contrived stolen
glimpses of the still-life rooms and the rooms where they were working
from the draped models. For the first time Cornelia saw the irregular
hemicycle of students silently intent upon the silent forms and faces
of those strange creatures who sat tranced in a lifeless immobility, as
if the long practice of their trade had resolved them into something as
impersonal as the innumerable pictures studied from them. She even
penetrated with Charmian to the women's life-room, where you really
could not go while the model was posing, and where they had to time
their visit at the moment when the girls had left off for lunch, and
were chattering over their chocolate. They had set it out on the vacant
model-stand, and they invited their visitors to break bread with them:
the bread they had brought to rub out their drawings with. They made
Cornelia feel as much at home with them on the summit they had reached,
as she felt with the timidest beginners in the Preparatory. Charmian
had reported everywhere that she had genius, and in the absence of
proofs to the contrary the life-class accepted her as if she had. Their
talk was not very different from the talk of the students in the lower
grades. They spoke of the Synthesis, and asked her how she liked it,
but they did not wait for her to say. They began to descant upon their
instructors, and the pictures their instructors had last exhibited at
the Academy or the American Artists; and the things that the old
Synthesis pupils had there. Cornelia learned here that even actual
Synthetics had things in the exhibitions, and that in the last Academy
a Preparatory girl had sold a picture; she determined that before the
winter was over she would at least give the Academy a chance to refuse
the picture of another Preparatory girl.

She got Charmian to point out the girl who had sold the picture; she
was a little, quiet-looking thing; Cornelia saw some of