The first things that excited the country girl's wonder were not the streets and buildings and the works of art, but the unwonted luxury of city life. Velvet carpets, large panes of plate glass, hot and cold water that came for the turning of a stopcock, illumination that burst forth as by magic, mirrors that showed the whole person and reduplicated the room--even doorbells and sliding doors, and dumb waiters and speaking-tubes, were things that filled her with astonishment. For weeks she felt that she had moved out of the world into a fairy book. But, being a high-spirited girl, she carefully concealed her wonder, moving about with apparent nonchalance, as though she had lived in the enchanted ground all her life. Secretly she carried on experiments upon water works, gas fixtures, and plate-glass mirrors, using the inductive method of reasoning, as all intelligent people have from the beginning, without any of the cumbrous and pedantic machinery provided for them by Lord Chancellor Bacon. She was soon at work, but drawing from uninteresting plaster casts of scroll-work in the lower classes of the School of Design for Women was not so pleasant as spontaneous picture-making on her slate had been. In Weston, too, she had been a prodigy; her gift for drawing was little less than miraculous in the eyes of her companions. But in Cooper Institute she was one of many, and there were those whom much practice had rendered more skillful. She would slip away from her work and go through the alcoves sometimes, on one pretext or another, to envy the girls who were in their second year, and were drawing from a bust of Psyche or The Young Augustus, and especially did she wish that she were one of the favored circle in the Venus Room. She thought it would be fine to try the statue of the Venus de Milo. But day in and day out she had to stand before a cast of a meaningless scroll, endeavoring to represent it on drawing paper. This was no longer play, but work as tedious as the geography lessons in Weston. There is a great difference between work and play, though they both may consist in doing the same thing. Nevertheless Henrietta had positive ability, and the almost mechanical training of the first months did her good.