Miss Pat at School | Page 6

this rickety, loose-jointed, pale-colored young woman was going to be worth while.
"As monitor, you mean?" responded the other, opening a locker near by and beginning to assemble her implements from a jumble of all sorts of odds and ends with which the locker was overflowing. "As merely monitor she sees that the models are posed, gets the numbers ready for us to draw when there is a new model, sees to it that we don't riot too loudly through the pose, takes any complaints we may have to make, to the powers above. But as guardian angel of the class, she soars far above our low conception of duty and propriety. Phew! Wait till you see her at it." Here her speech was lost while she delved head first into the welter.
Patricia occupied herself getting her tools from the convenient shelf on her own locker, hoping that the talk was not to end there.
Griffin emerged as suddenly as she had disappeared. "But it's the men that spoil her," she went on as though no interruption had occurred. "They're polite to her because she's so everlastingly gloomy. Same sort of politeness they'd show to a hearse, you know--respectful but not companionable."
Patricia gave an exclamation. "I believe I've seen her!" she cried. "She wears a long cloak and a hat with a big black plume, doesn't she? We noticed her at lunch and wondered what was the matter with her."
"Just a case of permanent glooms, if you ask me," replied Griffin airily. "She loves melancholy, though she is an awfully good sort, too. She gets on my nerves, though, she's so brittle."
Patricia puckered her brow inquiringly.
"Breaks a bone every time anyone looks hard at her," explained the other, shoving the protruding conglomeration of her locker inside and snapping the door quickly on it. "She's more bones than the average, and she breaks them regularly every time she learns the name of a new one. I think she oughtn't to be allowed in the dissecting room for any consideration. She's just out of splints now for a right arm fracture, and, believe me, she worked all the time with her left."
"How could she?" wondered Patricia, feeling awed by this devotion to art.
"She couldn't," grinned Griffin. "That's the point. She's so taken up with her pose as suffering martyr that she overlooks a trifle like good work. Heavens, there's the gong! I've kept you here gassing when I know you're crazy to get to work. Come along in, and I'll help you set up your stand before the model poses again."
Patricia followed her into the big, clay-soiled, dusty room, clutching her new smooth wooden tools with nervous fingers.
On the large revolving model stand in the center sat a dark, slender Russian-looking young man, indifferent to the group that with their tall-wheeled stands were circled about him. He sat with his narrow blue eyes sleepily fixed on the wall, regardless alike of the sturdy smocked men and slender boys in full blue-paint jackets, as of the equally silent and clayey girls and women that scrutinized him with earnestly squinting eyelids. The only creature in the room that seemed to evoke the slightest responsive flicker of intelligence was the black-robed, gray-aproned, redundant figure of the monitor.
Patricia's stand, with its heavy curved iron head-piece and some lengths of copper and lead wire, was waiting for her in the clay room, and together they wheeled it into the modeling room, where the gloomy Miss Green scanned them with kind but somber eyes, plainly regarding their entrance as an interruption.
"You've got to make butterflies of the wire-loops, you know, to hold the clay up, or it'll slump down off the iron headpiece soon as you get your head set up," explained her instructor in an agreeable tone. "It's easier to set up a head than a figure, I can tell you----"
"Miss Griffin!" came the dreary voice of the monitor, as with a fat and dimpled finger she pointed solemnly to the sign on the door, "No TALKING."
Griffin grinned amiably at the reproving finger. "Only the necessary instructions to a novice, Green dear," she protested smoothly. "I'm saving you the trouble of showing her how. You really ought to thank me instead of holding me up to scorn."
Miss Green, with a kindly glance at Patricia, puckered up her lips in the circle that only fat, soft-fleshed people can accomplish and laid the impartial finger on them as a sign that no more words were to be wasted, and the class, temporarily attentive to the newcomers, became absorbed again.
A heavy-shouldered dark man, whose workmanlike appearance was heightened by the torn and spotted linen apron he wore, came quietly over to Patricia, and, taking the wire from Miss Griffin's thin, nervous hands, silently and swiftly finished the work she had begun, while