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.

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 i