g 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.

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