s;
and some of these who could never have learned to draw well if they had
spent their lives in the Synthesis, and were only waiting till their
instructor should find the heart to forbid them further endeavor, were
so sweet and good that Cornelia's heart ached for them.

At first she was overawed by all the students, simply because they were
all older students at the Synthesis than she was. Then she included
them without distinction in the slight that she felt for the chatter
and the airs of some. After that she made her exceptions among them;
she begun to see how every one honored and admired the hard workers.
She could not revert to her awe of them, even of the hardest workers;
but she became more tolerant of the idlest and vaguest. She compared
herself with the clever ones, and owned herself less clever, not
without bitterness, but certainly with sincerity, and with a final
humility that enabled her to tolerate those who were least clever.

XVI.

When she got home from the Synthesis the first Saturday afternoon,
Cornelia climbed up the four flights of stairs that led to her little
room, and lay down to rest, as she promised Mrs. Burton she would do
every day; some days she did not. She had to lie on her bed, which
filled two-thirds of the room. There was a bureau with a glass, which
she could not see the bottom of her skirt in without jumping up; and a
wash-stand with a shut-down lid, where she wrote her letters and drew;
a chair stood between that and her trunk, which was next the door, and
let the door open part way.

It seemed very cramped at first, but she soon got used to it, and then
she did not think about it; but accepted it as she did everything else
in the life that was all so strange to her. She had never been in a
boarding-house before, and she did not know whether it was New York
usage or not, that her trunk, which the expressman had managed to leave
in the lower hall, should be left standing there for twenty-four hours
after his escape, and that then she should be asked to take some things
out of it so that it should not be too heavy for the serving-maids to
carry up to her room. There was no man-servant in the place; but the
landlady said that they expected to have a furnace-man as soon as it
came cold weather.

The landlady was such an indistinct quality, that it could seldom be
known whether she was at home or not, and when she was identifiably
present, whether she had promised or had n