But it didn’t work that way.  She found herself poring over them, yawning herself blind over the French legends that accompanied them.  (They were nearly all in French, these books, and though Rose had done two years’ work in this language at the university and passed all her examinations, she found these technical descriptions of costumes frightfully hard to understand.) She stuck at it, though, for a long while, until one morning a comparison occurred to her that made her shut the folio with a slam.  It had been in just this way, with just this dogged, blind, hopeless persistence, that, ages ago, in that former incarnation, she’d tried to study law!

This was too much for her.  She walked out of the library with the best appearance of unconcern that she could muster,—­it had been a near thing that she didn’t break down and cry—­and she did not go back.  Probably it was just as well that Galbraith hadn’t sent for her.  She’d only have made a ghastly failure of it, if he had.

The background, of course, to all these endeavors and discouragements, or, to describe it more justly, the indivisible, all-permeating ether they floated about in, was, just as it had been in the time of her success—­Rodney.  The occupations, routine and otherwise, that she gave her mind to, might seem, in a way, to crowd him out of it, although not one of them was undertaken without some reference to him; the success of this, the failure of that, brought him nearer, put him farther away, like the children’s game of Warm and Cold.

When she ran out of occupations that could absorb the conscious part of her mind, she did not even try to resist direct thoughts about him.  She’d spent uncounted hours since that opening night, wondering if he knew where she was, inventing reasons why, knowing, he didn’t come to her; explanations of the possibility of his still remaining in ignorance.  She’d gone over and over again, the probable things that he would say, the things that she would say in reply, when he did come.

She was prepared for his anger.  He was, she felt, entitled to be angry.  But she felt sure she could get him to listen while she told him just why and how she had done it, and what she had done, and she had a sort of tremulous confidence that when the story was told, entire, his anger would be found to have abated, if not altogether to have disappeared.  And afterward, when the shock had worn off, and he had had time to adjust himself to things, he’d begin to feel a little proud of her.  They could commence—­being friends.  She’d constructed and let her mind dwell on almost every conceivable combination of circumstances, except the one thing that happened.

Only, as the active actual half of her life grew more discouraging, harder to steer toward any object that seemed worth attaining, her imaginary life with Rodney lost its grip on fact and reason; became roseate, romantic, a thinner and more iridescent bubble, readier to burst and disappear altogether at an ungentle touch.