Part 15

On the common footing this drop to the solid ground gave, Cornelia asked her how long.

"Well, it's the beginning of my second year, now. If they don't let me go to round hands pretty soon, I shall have to see if I can't get the form by modelling. That's the best way. I suppose it's my imagination; it carries me away so, and I don't see the thing as it is before me; that's what they say. But with the clay, I'll have to, don't you know. Well, you know some of the French painters model their whole picture in clay and paint it, before they touch the canvas, any way. I shall try it here awhile longer, and then if I can't get to the round in any other way, I'll take to the clay. If sculpture concentrates you more, perhaps I may stick to it altogether. Art is one, anyhow, and the great thing is to live it. Don't you think so?"

"I don't know," said Cornelia. "I'm not certain I know what you mean."

"You will," said Miss Maybough, "after you've been here awhile, and get used to the atmosphere. I don't believe I really knew what life meant before I came to the Synthesis. When you get to realizing the standards of the Synthesis, then you begin to breathe freely for the first time. I expect to pass the rest of my days here. I shouldn't care if I stayed till I was thirty. How old are you?"

"I'm going on twenty," said Cornelia. "Why?"

"Oh, nothing. You can't begin too young; though some people think you oughtn't to come before you're eighteen. I look upon my days before I came here as simply wasted. Don't you want to go out and sit on the stairs awhile?"

"I don't believe I do," said Cornelia, taking up her drawing again, as if she were going on with it.

"Horrors!" Miss Maybough put her hand out over the sketch. "You don't mean that you're going to carry it any farther?"

"Why, it isn't finished yet," Cornelia began.

"Of course it isn't, and it never ought to be! I hope you're not going to turn out a niggler! Please don't! I couldn't bear to have you. Nobody will respect you if you finish. Don't! If you won't come out with me and get a breath of fresh air, do start a new drawing! I want them to see this in the rough. It's so bold."

Miss Maybough had left her own drawing in the rough, but it could not be called bold; though if she had seen the block hand with a faltering eye, she seemed to have had a fearless vision of many other things, and she had covered her paper with a fantastic medley of grotesque shapes, out of that imagination which she had given Cornelia to know was so fatally mischievous to her in its uninvited activities. "Don't look at them!" she pleaded, when Cornelia involuntarily glanced at her study. "My only hope is to hate them. I almost pray to be delivered from them. Let's talk of something else." She turned the sheet over. "Do you mind my having said that about your drawing?"

"No!" said Cornelia, provoked to laughter by the solemnity of the demand. "Why should I?"

"Oh, I don't know. Do you think you shall like me? I mean, do you care if I like you--very, very much?"

"I don't suppose I could stop it if I did, could I?" asked Cornelia.

The Sphinx seemed to find heart to smile. "Of course, I'm ridiculous. But I do hope we're going to be friends. Tell me about yourself. Or, have some more tea!"

XIV.

"I don't want any more tea, thank you," said Cornelia, "and there isn't anything to tell."

"There must be!" the other girl insisted, clinging to her bottle with tragic intensity. "Any one can see that you've lived. What part of the country did you come from?"

"Ohio," said Cornelia, as the best way to be done with it.

"And have you ever been in Santa Fe?"

"Goodness, no! Why, it's in New Mexico!"

"Yes; I was born there. Then my father went to Colorado. He isn't living, now. Are your father and mother living?"

"My mother is," said Cornelia; the words brought up a vision of her mother, as she must be sitting that moment in the little front-room, and a mist came suddenly before her eyes; she shut her lips hard to keep them from trembling.

"I see, you worship her," said Miss Maybough fervidly, keeping her gaze fixed upon Cornelia. "You are homesick!"

"I'm not homesick!" said Cornelia, angry that she should be so and that she should be denying it.

"Mine," said the other, "died while I was a baby. She had Indian blood," she added in the same way in which she had said her name was Charmian.

"Did she?" Cornelia asked.

"That is the legend," said Miss Maybough solemnly. "Her grandmother was a Zuni princess." She turned her profile. "See?"