She sat before her patient little drawing of a ruined castle on a hilltop, unable to draw a line, making a weak little scratch now and then, and rubbing it out as soon as it had appeared.
“What is the trouble, Rosaleen?” asked Miss Waters. “Don’t you feel well?”
“Oh, yes, thank you, Miss Waters! I feel well. Only ... I don’t know how it is ... but—I don’t feel like drawing a bit to-day.”
“I know, my dear child!” said Miss Waters. “I’m the same way myself. It’s the beautiful autumn weather. It’s hard to concentrate on work. It puts me in mind of my student days, in Brussels.”
She sighed. Those long years, in Paris and Brussels, trotting about from one English family to another, teaching drawing, from one jolly demi-mondaine to another, teaching English; the bare little rooms she had shivered in, the dismal pensions, the dreadful straits in which she had so often found herself, poor solitary muddle-headed little foreigner! And yet she had loved it, that illusion of an artistic life; friendless and poor as she was, she had had her pleasures, had dined at the little restaurants where she could at least see artists, had spent hours and days in the picture galleries, had felt gay and adventurous and irresponsible.
“I’ll tell you what, Rosaleen!” she cried suddenly. “Suppose we both go out and take a turn round the square? It might do us both good—freshen our brains!”
Rosaleen looked at the clock. Half past two; her lesson didn’t end till three, and she had allowed herself half an hour to get up to the Library. She couldn’t think what to say.
Miss Waters believed that she hesitated because she didn’t want to waste any of her lesson time.
“We’ll go out, just for a ‘blow’,” she said. “And then you can come back and work extra late, and we’ll have tea together. I haven’t any pupils this afternoon.”
“But—I have to stop at the Library and get a book for Miss Amy,” said Rosaleen. “And—I promised to take it home early.”