might well have come from an unhappy love-affair; once
when he took one of the instructor's classes at the Synthesis
temporarily, his forbidding urbanity was so glacial, that the girls
scarcely dared to breathe in his presence, and left it half-frozen. The
severest of the masters, with all his sarcasm, was simply nothing to
him.

Cornelia liked to hear that. She should have despised Ludlow if she had
heard he was silly with girls, and she did not wish to despise him,
though she knew that he despised her; she could bear that. The
Synthesis praises made her the more determined, however, to judge his
recent work when she came to see it, just as she would judge any one's
work. But first of all she meant not to see it.

She seemed to have more trouble in bringing herself back to this point
than in keeping Charmian to it. Charmian came to believe her at last,
after declaring it the rudest thing she ever heard of, and asking
Cornelia what she expected to say to Mrs. Westley when she came for
her. Cornelia could never quite believe it herself, though she
strengthened her purpose with repeated affirmation, tacit and explicit,
and said it would be very easy to tell Mrs. Westley she was not going,
if she ever did come for her. She could not keep Charmian from
referring the case to every one on the steps and window-sills in the
Synthesis, and at the sketch-class, where Charmian published it the
first time Cornelia came, and wove a romance from it which involved
herself as the close friend and witness of so strange a being.

Cornelia tried not to let all this interfere with her work, but it did,
and at the sketch-class where she might have shown some rebound from
the servile work of the Preparatory, and some originality, she
disappointed those whom Charmian had taught to expect anything of her.
They took her rustic hauteur and her professed indifference to the
distinction of Ludlow's invitation, as her pose. She went home from the
class vexed to tears by her failure, and puzzled to know what she
really should say to that Mrs. Westley when she came; it wouldn't be so
easy to tell her she was not going, after all. Cornelia hated her, and
wished she would not come; she had let the whole week go by, now, till
Thursday, and perhaps she really would not come. The girl knew so
little of the rigidity of city dates that she thought very likely Mrs.
Westley had decided to put it off till another week.

She let herself into her boarding-ho