“Only once, really—the others were almost too casual. I supposed your mother had told you.”

“Did they die?” asked Ruth.

“Not to my knowledge—I never killed any of them,” said Gloria.

And Ruth put this conversation away in the back of her brain for future reference, along with several dozen other things that she didn’t exactly understand.

23

CHAPTER II

Ruth would have liked a scholarship—not because she could not easily afford the small fees at the Art Students’ League, but because a scholarship would have meant that she had unusual talent; but she didn’t get one. No one seemed particularly interested in her work. The woman who enrolled her in the League was as casual as a clerk in an hotel.

The manner of the enrolment clerk and the grandeur of the Fine Arts Building produced a feeling of insignificance in Ruth that was far from pleasant. She engaged her locker for the year, and when she was led to it to put her board and paints away, and saw the rows upon rows of other lockers, she felt even smaller. Was it possible that all those lockers were needed? That so many other girls and boys were also art students? If there was an art student for every locker and each of them shared her determination to become a great painter, the world would be so flooded with splendid art that one might better be a stenographer. Then she comforted herself that all of the students could not possibly succeeded. Some of them, the girls especially, would doubtless give up art for marriage and babies. Some of the men would become commercialized, 24go in for illustrating or even advertising, but she would go “onward and upward,” as her instructor in Indianapolis had so thrillingly said. She felt better after that; and seeing her reflection in a shop window she felt better still. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was interesting looking, she told herself. The way she combed her almost black hair down over her ears Madonna fashion, her little low-heeled shoes, her complete absence of waist line, all marked her as “different.”

24

She had enrolled for the morning class in portrait painting from 9:00 to 12:30 and the afternoon class in life drawing from 1:00 to 4:30 and she would attend the Friday afternoon lectures on anatomy. They began at 4:30, 

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