w fell asleep where she lay, and she was startled from her nap,
but hardly surprised, to hear her name spoken in the hall far below, as
if it were a theme of contention between the bass-voiced Irish girl and
some one at the street door, who supported the other side of the
question in low, indistinct, lady-like murmurs.

"No, she don't be in," said the Irish girl bluntly. The polite murmur
insisted, and the Irish girl said, with finality, "Well, then, yous can
go up yourselves and see; the room is right over the dure, four flights
up."

Cornelia jumped up and tried to pull her hair into a knot before the
glass. There came a tap at her door and the voice of Charmian Maybough
asked, "May I come in, Miss Saunders,--Cornelia?"

"Yes," said Cornelia, and she opened the door as far as her trunk would
let her.

Charmian pushed impetuously in. She took Cornelia in her arms and
kissed her, as if they had not met for a long time.

"Oh," she said, whirling about, so as to sweep the whole room with her
glance, before sinking down on Cornelia's trunk, "why can't _I_ have
something like this? Well, I shall have, I hope, before I die, yet.
What made her say you weren't in? I knew you were." She rose and flew
about the room, and examined it in detail. She was very beautifully
dressed, in a street costume of immediate fashion, without a suggestion
of the aestheticism of the picturesque gown she wore at the Synthesis;
that had originality, but Cornelia perceived with the eye trained to
see such differences, that this had authority. Charmian could not help
holding and carrying herself differently in it, too. She was
exquisitely gloved, and Cornelia instinctively felt that her hat was
from Paris, though till then she had never seen a Paris hat to know it.
She might have been a little overawed by it, if the wearer had not
abruptly asked her what she thought of it.

"Well," said Cornelia, with her country directness, which was so
different from the other's abruptness, "I think it's about the most
perfect thing I ever saw."

Charmian sighed. "I saw you looking at it. Yes, it _is_ a dream. But
it's a badge of slavery. So's the whole costume. Look how I'm laced!"
She flung open the jacket and revealed a waist certainly much smaller
than she had earlier in the day. "That's the way it goes through my
whole life. Mamma is dead set against the artistic, and I'm dead set
against the fashionable. As long as I'm at the Synthesis, I do as the
S