Norn?"

Elinor reared her head with dignity. "He was very kind and friendly to us," she explained to their companion, "because he had been very much devoted to my aunt, who left us the house where we now live. He had no mother and Aunt Louise was very fond of him."

"Well, you're awfully in luck, however it is," replied the girl. "I'll see you in about fifteen minutes," and she nodded as she moved off, her dark hair gleaming in the mingled lights as she carried her small fine head proudly on her slender neck.

Patricia was about to make a comment when she suddenly turned and came back to them.

"I forgot to tell you my name," she said, holding out a strong, slender hand. "I am Margaret Howes, and I know you are Elinor Kendall, for I saw it on your locker. I don't know your sister's name—she is your sister, isn't she?"

Patricia was introduced, and Margaret Howes, with promises to meet them later, went off finally, and Patricia and Elinor set to work to dispose of their neglected lunch, enjoying their own comments on the assembled groups more than they did the cakes and fruit.

"Just look at that mournful creature." Patricia motioned with her eyebrows to the opposite side of the room, where a large, stout young woman in somber cloak and wide-plumed hat was eating her way through a chocolate éclair with just such an air of tragic and settled melancholy as one sometimes sees in a child whose grief is momentarily its most cherished possession.

"Isn't she the limit?" said Patricia in disdain. "She oughtn't to eat frivolous things like éclairs. I wonder at her lack of judgment."

"She isn't in mourning," said Elinor, making a discovery. "I wonder who she is. She's impressive enough to be the president of the board, and Bruce says that's the most important person in the place."

"She's rather too collap-y for my taste," volunteered Patricia, gathering up the remains of their repast. "I like the looks of lots of the others far better than hers. Let's ask Miss Margaret Howes about her. No doubt she can tell us what is her secret trouble."

They followed the general exodus upstairs, feeling more and more at home with every step.

"Isn't it funny how familiar that antique room looks?" said Patricia with enjoyment. "I feel quite like an old residenter already. By the time my clay comes I'll have the sensations of the oldest inhabitant."

Elinor was breathing fast as she swept the corridor with anxious glance.

"I hope 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.

Patricia occupied herself getting her tools from the convenient shelf on her own locker, hoping that the talk was not to end there.

Griffin emerged as suddenly as she had disappeared. "But it's the men that spoil her," she went on as though no interruption had occurred. "They're polite to her because she's so everlastingly gloomy. Same sort of politeness they'd show to a hearse, you know—respectful but not companionable."

Patricia gave an exclamation. "I believe I've seen her!" she cried. "She wears a long cloak and a hat with a big black plume, doesn't she? We noticed her at lunch and wondered what was the matter with her."

"Just a case of permanent glooms, if you ask me," replied Griffin airily. "She loves melancholy, though she is an awfully good sort, too. She gets on my nerves, though, she's so brittle."

Patricia puckered her brow inquiringly.

"Breaks a bone every time anyone looks hard at her," explained the other, shoving the protruding conglomeration of her locker inside and snapping the door quickly on it. "She's more bones than the average, and she breaks them regularly every time she learns the name of a new one. I think she oughtn't to be allowed in the dissecting room for any consideration. She's just out of splints now for a right arm fracture, and, believe me, she worked all the time with her left."

"How could she?" wondered Patricia, feeling awed by this devotion to art.

"She couldn't," grinned Griffin. "That's the point. She's so taken up with her pose as suffering martyr that she overlooks a trifle like good work. Heavens, there's the gong! I've kept you here gassing when I know you're crazy to get to work. Come along in, and I'll help you set up your stand before the model poses again."

Patricia followed her into the big, clay-soiled, dusty room, clutching her new smooth wooden tools with nervous fingers.

On the large revolving model stand in the center sat a dark, slender Russian-looking young man, indifferent to the group that with their tall-wheeled stands were circled about him. He sat with his narrow blue eyes sleepily fixed on the wall, regardless alike of the sturdy smocked men and slender boys in full blue-paint jackets, as of the equally silent and clayey girls and women that scrutinized him with earnestly squinting eyelids. The only creature in the room that seemed to evoke the slightest responsive flicker of intelligence was the black-robed, gray-aproned, redundant figure of the monitor.

Patricia's stand, with its heavy curved iron head-piece and some lengths of copper and lead wire, was waiting for her in the clay room, and together they wheeled it into the modeling room, where the gloomy Miss Green scanned them with kind but somber eyes, plainly regarding their entrance as an interruption.

"You've got to make butterflies of the wire-loops, you know, to hold the clay up, or it'll slump down off the iron headpiece soon as you get your head set up," explained her instructor in an agreeable tone. "It's easier to set up a head than a figure, I can tell you——"