Her first adventure in this direction was downright ludicrous, as she was aware without being able to summon the mood to appreciate it.  The girls she’d known, back in the Edgewater days, who had ambitions to learn to draw went to the Art Institute.  So Rose, summoning her courage for a sortie across the avenue, want there too, and felt, as she climbed the steps between the lions, a little the way Christian did in similar circumstances.  After waiting a while she was shown into the office of an affable young man, with efficient looking eye-glasses and a keen sort of voice, and told him with admirable brevity that she wanted to learn to draw, as a preliminary to designing costumes.

He approved this ambition cordially enough and made it evident that the resources of the institute were entirely adequate to her needs.  But then, just about simultaneously, she made the discovery that the course he was talking about was one of from three to five years’ duration, and he, that the time immediately at her disposal amounted to something like a fortnight.  They were mutually too completely disconcerted to do anything, for a moment, but stare at each other.  When he found his breath he told her that he was afraid they couldn’t do anything for her.

“There are places, of course, here in town (there’s one right down the street) where they’ll take you on for a month, or a week, or a day, if you like; let you begin working in oil in the life class the vary first morning, if you’ve a notion to.  But we don’t believe in that get-rich-quick sort of business.  We believe in laying the foundation first.”

His manner in describing the other sort of place had been so annihilating, his purpose in citing this horrible example was so plain, that he was justifiably taken aback when she asked him, very politely, to be sure, “Would you mind telling me where that other place is; the one down the street?”

He did mind exceedingly, and it is likely he wouldn’t have done it if she’d been less extraordinarily good to look at and if there hadn’t been, in her very expressive blue eyes, a gleam that suggested she was capable of laughing at him for having trapped himself like that.  She wasn’t laughing at him now, be it understood; had made her request with a quite adorable seriousness.  Only ...

He gave her the address of an art academy on Madison Street and thither at once she made her way, faintly cheered by the note on which her encounter with the young man had ended, but on the whole rather depressed by the thought of the five years he’d talked about.

They were more tactful at the new place. Ars Longa est was not a motto they paraded.  They were not shocked at all at the notion of a young woman’s learning as much as she could about drawing in two weeks.  There was a portrait sketch class every morning; twenty minute poses.  You put down as much as you could of how the model looked to you in that space of time, and then began again on something else.  All the equipment Rose would need was a big apron, a stick of charcoal and a block of drawing paper; all of which were obtainable on the premises.  She could begin this minute if she liked.  It was almost as simple as getting on a pay-as-you-enter street-car.