This jumped with Rose’s mood exactly, and she promptly fell to, with a momentary flare-up of the zest with which she had gone to work for Galbraith.  But it was only momentary.  She hadn’t a natural aptitude for drawing, and her attempts to make the black lines she desperately dug and smudged into the white paper represent, recognizably, the object she was looking at failed so lamentably as to discourage her almost from the start.

She kept at it for the two weeks she’d contracted for, but at the end of that time she gave it up.  She hadn’t made any visible progress, and besides, she might be hearing from Galbraith almost any day now.

And when, four or five days later, her intolerable restlessness over waiting for a letter that didn’t come, making up reasons why it hadn’t come, one minute, and deciding that it never would, the next, drove her to do something once more, she set out on a new tack.  If the ability to make fancy little water-colors of impossible-looking girls in only less impossible costumes were really an essential part of the business of designing the latter, then she’d have to set about learning, in a systematic way, to paint them; find out the proper way to begin, and take her time about it.  Her two weeks at the academy had proved that it wasn’t a knack that she could pick up casually.  But there were books on costumes, she knew; histories of clothes, that went as far back as any sort of histories, with marvelous colored plates which gave you all the details.  Bertie Willis had told her all about that when they were getting up their group for the Charity Ball.  There were shelves of them, she knew, over at the Newberry Library.  A knowledge of their contents would be sure to be valuable to her when Galbraith should set her to designing more costumes for him—­if ever he did.

This misgiving, that she might never hear from him, that his plans had changed since their talk, so that he wasn’t going to need any assistant, or that he had found some one in New York better qualified for the work, was, really, a little artificial.  She encouraged it as a defense against another which was, in its insidious way, much more terrifying.

Would she ever be capable, again, of producing another idea in case it should be wanted?  That one little flash of inspiration she’d had, that had resulted in the twelve costumes for the sextette—­where had it come from?  How had she happened on it?  Wasn’t it, perhaps, just a fluke that never could be repeated?  During those wonderful days she had had antennae out everywhere, bringing her impressions, suggestions from the unlikeliest objects.  Now they were all drawn in and the part of her mind that had responded to them felt numb.

She ignored this sensation, or rather this absence of sensation, as well as she could; just as one might ignore the creeping approach of paralysis.  She had an unacknowledged reason for going to the library and beginning that historic study of costumes.  Certainly the sight of those quaint old plates ought to set her imagination racing again.