you spent weeks making a charcoal study of a bust of Demosthenes. But
this lack never even occurred to Rose as a handicap. She hadn't the
faintest impulse to make a beginning by putting a picture down on paper
and making a dress of it afterward. She went straight at her materials,
or the equivalent of her materials, as a sculptor goes at his clay. She
couldn't have told just why she had bought those three shades of paper
cambric.

"I'm really awfully obliged to you for having explained it to me," she
told Burton, the portrait painter long afterward.

"I see!" he had exclaimed, on the occasion of an initiatory visit to her
workroom. "You design these things in their values first, just the way
the old masters used to paint. Once you get the values in, you can
project them in any colors that will leave your value scale true."

And Rose, as she said, was really grateful to him for telling her what
it was she had been doing all the while, just as Monsieur Jourdain was
grateful for the information that he had been talking prose all his life
and never known it.

What she had felt, of course, at the very outset, was the need of
something to indicate roughly the darks and lights in her design. And,
short of the wild extravagance of slashing into the fabrics themselves
and making her mistakes at their expense, she could think of nothing
better than the scheme she chose.

She came to the conclusion afterward that even apart from the
consideration of expense, her own plan was better. You got more vigor
somehow, into the actual construction of the thing, if you could make it
express something quite independently of color and texture.

Rehearsal was dismissed a little early that first night, and she was
back in her room by eleven. Arrived there, she took off her outer
clothes, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and went to work. When at
last, with a little sigh, and a tremulously smiling acknowledgment of
fatigue, she got up and looked at her watch, it was four o'clock in the
morning. She'd had one of those experiences that every artist can
remember a few of in his life, when it is impossible for anything to go
wrong; when each tentative experiment accomplishes not only its purpose,
but another unsuspected purpose as well; when the vision miraculously
betters itself in the execution; when the only difficulty is that which
the hands have in the purely mechanical operation of keeping up.

She was destined later, of course, eve