es were put, with rugs over them to save the
ladies' dresses. The effect was very pretty, with palettes on nails,
high up, and tall flowers in vases on brackets, and a life-study in
plaster by one of the girls, in a corner of the room. It all had the
charm of tasteful design yielding here and there to happy caprice; this
mingling of the ordered and the bizarre, expressed the spirit, at once
free and submissive, of the place. There had been a great deal of
trouble which at times seemed out of all keeping with the end to be
gained, but when it was all over, the trouble seemed nothing. The
exhibition was the best the Synthesis had ever made, and those who had
been left out of it were not the least of those in the masquerade; they
were by no means the worst dressed, or when they unmasked, the
plainest, and Charmian's favorite maxim that art was all one, was
verified in the costumes of several girls who could not draw any better
than she could. If they were not on the walls in one way neither were
they in another. After they had wandered heart-sick through the
different rooms, and found their sketches nowhere, they had their
compensation when the dancing began.

The floor was filled early, and the scene gathered gayety and
brilliancy. It had the charm that the taste of the school could give in
the artistic effects, and its spirit of generous comradery found play
in the praises they gave each other's costumes, and each other's looks
when they were not in costume. It was a question whether Cornelia who
came as herself, was lovelier than Charmian, who was easily
recognizable as Cleopatra, with ophidian accessories in her dress that
suggested at once the serpent of old Nile, and a Moqui snake-dancer.
Cornelia looked more beautiful than ever; her engagement with Ludlow
had come out and she moved in the halo of poetic interest which
betrothal gives a girl with all other girls; it was thought an
inspiration that she should not have come in costume, but in her own
character. Ludlow's fitness to carry off such a prize was disputed; he
was one of the heroes of the Synthesis, and much was conceded to him
because he had more than once replaced the instructor in still-life
there. But there remained a misgiving with some whether Cornelia was
right in giving up her art for him; whether she were not recreant to
the Synthesis in doing that; the doubt, freshly raised by her beauty,
was not appeased till Charmian met it with the assertion that