"Stay five years more!" Miss Maybough did not give this time to sink very deep into Cornelia's spirit. "Will you let me call you by your first name?" "Why, I've hardly ever been called by any other," said Cornelia simply. "And will you call me Charmian?" "I had just as lief." Cornelia laughed; she could not help it; that girl seemed so odd; she did not know whether she liked her or not. "What poise you _have_ got!" sighed Charmian. "May I come to see you? Not a ceremonious call. In your own room; where we can talk." Cornelia thought that if they went on as they had that day, they should probably talk quite enough at the Synthesis; but she said, "Why, yes, I should like to have you, if you won't care for my sitting on the trunk. There's only one chair." "Let _me_ have the trunk! Promise me you'll let me sit on the trunk. It's divine! Is it in a Salvation Hotel?" "What do you mean?" asked Cornelia. "Why, that's what they call the places that the Young Women's Christian Association keep." "No, it isn't. It's just a boarding-house." Cornelia wrote her address on a piece of paper, and Charmian received it with solemn rapture. She caught Cornelia in a sudden embrace and kissed her, before Cornelia could help herself. "Oh, I adore you!" she cried. They parted at the head of the stairs, where they found themselves among groups of students arriving from all parts of the place, and pausing for Synthesis gossip, which Cornelia could not have entered into yet if she had wished. She escaped, and walked home to her boarding-house with rather a languid pace, and climbed to her little room on the fifth story, and lay down on her bed. It was harder work than teaching, and her back ached, and her heart was heavy with the thought of five years in the Synthesis, when she barely had money enough for one winter. She was not afraid of the work; she liked that; she would be glad to spend her whole life at it; but she could not give five years to it, and perhaps ten. She was ashamed now to think she had once dreamed of somehow slipping through in a year, and getting the good of it without working for it. She tried to plan how she could go home and teach a year, and then come back and study a year, and so on; but by the end of the twenty years that it would take for ten years' study at this rate, she would be an old woman of forty, ready to drop into the grave. She was determined not to give up, and if she did not give up, there was no other end to it; or so it seemed at the close of her first day in the Synthesis. She was very homesick, and she would have liked to give up altogether and go home. But she thought of what people would say; of how her mother, who would be so glad to see her, would feel. She would not be a baby, and she turned her face over in the pillow and sobbed. XV.