Original drawing: a coquette and her admirer

This is working art, not a printed page: an illustration board with the central scene boxed in ink and the margins left as a scratch pad. Inside the frame, a young man in a fur-collared coat leans toward a dancer in a froth of ruffled skirts and a pompom-crowned hat, mid-flirtation. Around them the same figure tumbles and pirouettes through Brinkley's clouds of feathery line, tried again and again, with a few tiny lettered signs pinned into the corners. You can see the blue underdrawing, the second thoughts, the places where the pen bore down and the places it barely grazed. Surviving original comic art by any of these women is scarce. A sheet that still shows the artist thinking, mid-decision, is scarcer.