Miss Howes doesn't forget," she said apprehensively. "I'd so
much rather go into the class with her."

A girl sauntered past them as they loitered before their lockers.

"Looking for anyone?" she asked briskly, and hardly waiting for the
answer, she raised her voice and called through the door of the next
room:

"Hello, Howes! Here's someone looking for you!"

Patricia expected Margaret Howes as she emerged to show some surprise
or annoyance at this summary mode of speech, but she was as serene and
unconscious as ever.

"I'm busy, Griffin," she began, and then broke off as she saw the
girls. "Oh, here you are," she said to Elinor. "I was looking for you
in the modeling room."

The newcomer raised her pale eyebrows. "Absent-minded as ever, I see,
Howes," she said with a whimsical sort of fondness in her peculiar
voice. "Better run off to the head class before you forget where
you're due."

She watched Margaret Howes and Elinor till they turned into the
screened entrance to the portrait room; then she turned to Patricia
with easy friendliness.

"You're fresh meat, aren't you?" she asked with a grin that widened her
full mouth to a line. "When'd you come?"

Patricia gave her the brief outlines of her enrolment, and she nodded
approvingly.

"Good stuff in the modeling room," she commented briskly. "But don't
let old Bottle Green bulldoze you into thinking it's a deaf and dumb
asylum or the vestibule to the morgue or any such sequestered spot.
She's deadly dull, you know, and she almost faints if you whisper while
the model is posing. She's monitor and I will say she enjoys the job."

"What does she do?" asked Patricia, delighted with the ease and candor
of this speech. She felt sure this rickety, loose-jointed,
pale-colored young woman was going to be worth while.

"As monitor, you mean?" responded the other, opening a locker near by
and beginning to assemble her implements from a jumble of all sorts of
odds and ends with which the locker was overflowing. "As merely
monitor she sees that the models are posed, gets the numbers ready for
us to draw when there is a new model, sees to it that we don't riot too
loudly through the pose, takes any complaints we may have to make, to
the powers above. But as guardian angel of the class, she soars far
above our low conception of duty and propriety. Phew! Wait till you
see her at it." Here her speech was lost while she delved head first
into the welter.