Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/78

 years longer, and then start at a lower salary than her more ambitious and earnest fellow-worker student.

The course in general art work, leading to illustration at the Cooper Institute, New York City, runs four years, yet a girl who had studied only eighteen months, met with financial reverses, entered the offices of a fashion syndicate and under the practical direction of its manager whipped her somewhat crude work into practical shape, with just the dash of originality which is sometimes born of desperation. Within a month she was earning fifteen dollars a week. To-day she is head of the illustrated fashion department of a magazine for women, and is drawing a very comfortable salary.

The girl who can take up the study of art as her sister may be studying stenography, closing her ears to the call of Bohemia, and working as if she were engaged in a trade at which she must serve a stern apprenticeship, need not dawdle away four years of youth, energy and family funds. Her work will be marketable not when the school hands her a diploma, but when it has a practical market value.

From this you must not think that I advise hasty, superficial work. What menaces the success of the average out-of-town girl sent to a city art school by her parents, is misconstruing that famous line: "Art is long and time is