Betty got to work, as soon as she knew how one began to get to work. It was her first attempt at a drawing from the life, saving certain not unsuccessful caricatures of her fellow pupils, her professor and her chaperon. So far she had only been set to do landscape, and laborious drawings of casts from the antique. The work was much harder than she had expected. And the heat was overpowering. She wondered how these other girls could stand it. Their amused, half-patronising, half-disdainful glances made her furious.
She rubbed out most of the lines she had put in and gasped for breath.
The room, the students, the naked brown girl on the model's throne, all swam before her eyes. She got to the door somehow, opened and shut it, and found herself sitting on the top stair with closed eyelids and heart beating heavily.
[Illustration: "Betty looked nervously around--the scene was agitatingly unfamiliar"] Some one held water to her lips. She was being fanned with a handkerchief.
"I'm all right," she said.
"Yes, it's hotter than usual to-day," said the handkerchief-holder, fanning vigorously.
"Why do they have it so hot?" asked poor Betty.
"Because of the model, of course. Poor thing! she hasn't got a nice blue gown and a pinky-greeny pinafore to keep her warm. We have to try to match the garden of Eden climate--when we're drawing from a girl who's only allowed to use Eve's fashion plates."
Betty laughed and opened her eyes.
"How jolly of you to come out after me," she said.
"Oh, I was just the same at first. All right now? I ought to get back. You just sit here till you feel fit again. So long!"
So Betty sat there on the bare wide brown stair, staring at the window, till things had steadied themselves, and then she went back to her work.
Her easel was there, and her half-rubbed out drawing--No, that was not her drawing. It was a head, vaguely but very competently sketched, a likeness--no, a caricature--of Betty herself.
She looked round--one quick but quite sufficient look. The girl next her, and the one to that girl's right, were exchanging glances, and the exchange ceased just too late. Betty saw.
From then till the rest Betty did not look at the model. She looked, but furtively, at those two girls. When, at the rest-time, the model stretched and yawned and got off her throne and into a striped petticoat, most of the students took their "easy" on the stairs: among these the two.