Toward the end of the afternoon the monitor's vigilance relaxed again, and Miss Maybough began to talk again. "If you want to be anything by the Synthesis standards," she said, "you've got to keep this up a whole year, you know." It was now four o'clock, and Cornelia had been working steadily since eleven, except for the half-hour at lunch-time. "They'll see how well you draw; you needn't be afraid of their not doing that; and they'll let you go on to the round at once, perhaps. But if you're truly Synthetic in spirit, you won't want to. You'll want to get all you can out of the block; and it'll take you a year to do that; then another year for the full length, you know. At first we only had the block here, and a good many people think now that the full length Preparatory encroaches on the Antique. Sometimes they even let you put in backgrounds here, but it don't matter much: when the instructor in the Antique gets hold of you he makes you unlearn everything you've learnt in the full-length. _He's_ grand." A girl who was working at the other end of the table said with a careless air, "They told me I might go up to the Antique to-day." "Lida!" Miss Maybough protested, in a voice hoarse with admiration. "Yes; but I'm not going." "_Why_ not? I should think you would be so proud. _How_ did they come to tell you?" "Oh, they just said I might. But I'm not going. They're so severe in the Antique. They just discourage you." "Yes, that is so," said Miss Maybough, with a sigh of solemn joy. "They make you feel as if you couldn't draw at all." "Yes," said the other girl. "They act as if you didn't know a thing." "I _wouldn't_ go," said Miss Maybough. "I don't know. Perhaps I may." The girl went on drawing, and Miss Maybough turned to Cornelia again. "Towards the end of your third year--or perhaps you don't like to have your future all mapped out. Does it scare you?" "I guess if it does I shall live through it," said Cornelia steadily; her heart was beginning to quake somewhat, but she was all the more determined not to show it. "Well, the third year you may get to painting still-life, while you keep up your drawing afternoons here. The next year you'll go into the antique class, if they'll let you, and draw heads, and keep up your still-life mornings. When they think you're fit for it, they'll let you do an arm, maybe, and work along that way to the full figure; and that takes another whole winter. Then you go into the life class, one of them, all the morning, and keep drawing from the antique in the afternoons, or else do heads from the model. You do a head every day, and then paint it out, and begin another the next day. You learn to sacrifice self to art. It's grand! Well, then, the next winter you keep on just the same, and as many winters after that as you please. You know what one instructor said to a girl that asked him what she should do after she had been five years in the Synthesis?" "No, I don't," answered Cornelia anxiously.