They talked about the different instructors, how awful they were, and
how they made you cry sometimes, they were so hard on your work; but if
you amounted to anything, you did not mind it when you got to feel what
they meant; then you _wanted_ them to be harsh. They said of one, "My!
You ought to see him! _He_ can spoil your drawing for you! He just
takes your charcoal, and puts thick black lines all over everything. It
don't do to finish much for _him_." They celebrated another for sitting
down in front of your work, and drooping in silent despair before it
for awhile, and then looking up at you in cold disgust, and asking,
"What made you draw it _that_ way?" as if it were inconceivable anybody
should have been willing to do it so. There were other instructors who
were known to have the idea of getting at the best in you by a
sympathetic interest in what you had tried for, and looking for some
good in it. The girls dramatized their manner of doing this; they did
not hold them in greater regard than the harder masters, but they did
not hold them in less, and some of them seemed to value an instructor
as much for the way he squinted his eyes at your drawing as for what he
said of it.
The young men did not talk so much of the instructors; they were more
reticent about everything. But some had formed themselves upon them,
and you could tell which each of these was studying under; or this was
what Charmian Maybough said.
She led Cornelia all about through the quaint old rookery, with its
wandering corridors, and its clusters of rooms distributed at random in
the upper stories of several buildings which the Synthesis had gathered
to itself as if by a sort of affinity, and she lectured upon every one
and everything.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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