"Yes." Ludlow smiled. "She isn't so very little, any more. It was she who kept me. I found a dispatch at my place when I got home to-day, telling me she was coming, and would arrive at six, and there was no time to trouble you; it was half-past when I got it." "She's actually come then?" asked Mrs. Westlay. "Nothing you could say would stop her?" "No," said Ludlow with a shrug. He added, after a moment, "But I don't know that I blame her. Nothing would have stopped _me_." "And is there anything else I can do? Has she a pleasant place to stay?" "Good enough, I fancy. It's a boarding-house where several people I know have been. She must be left to her own devices, now. That's the best thing for her. It's the only thing." XII. In spite of his theory as to what was best for her, in some ways Ludlow rather expected that Cornelia would apply to him for advice as to how and where she should begin work. He forgot how fully he had already given it; but she had not. She remembered what she had overheard him say to her mother, that day in the Fair House, about the superiority of the Synthesis of Studies, and she had since confirmed her faith in his judgment by much silent inquiry of the newspapers. They had the Sunday edition of the _Lakeland Light_ at Pymantoning, and Cornelia had kept herself informed of the "Gossip of the Ateliers," and concerning "Women and Artists," "Artists' Summer Homes," "Phases of Studio Life," "The Ladies who are Organizing Ceramic Clubs," "Women Art Students," "Glimpses of the Dens of New York Women Artists," and other aesthetic interests which the Sunday edition of the _Light_ purveyed with the newspaper syndicate's generous and indiscriminate abundance. She did not believe it all; much of it seemed to her very silly; but she nourished her ambition upon it all the same. The lady writers who celebrated the lady artists, and who mostly preferred to swim in seas of personal float, did now and then offer their readers a basis of solid fact; and they all agreed that the Synthesis of Art Studies was the place for a girl if she was in earnest and wished to work.