Major and Mrs. Monarch confessed to me they had hoped I might be able to work THEM into my branch of the enterprise. They knew I was to do the first of the books, Rutland Ramsay, but I had to make clear to them that my participation in the rest of the affair--this first book was to be a test--must depend on the satisfaction I should give. If this should be limited my employers would drop me with scarce common forms. It was therefore a crisis for me, and naturally I was making special preparations, looking about for new people, should they be necessary, and securing the best types. I admitted however that I should like to settle down to two or three good models who would do for everything. "Should we have often to--a--put on special clothes?" Mrs. Monarch timidly demanded. "Dear yes--that's half the business." "And should we be expected to supply our own costumes? "Oh no; I've got a lot of things. A painter's models put on--or put off--anything he likes." "And you mean--a--the same?" "The same?" Mrs. Monarch looked at her husband again. "Oh she was just wondering," he explained, "if the costumes are in GENERAL use." I had to confess that they were, and I mentioned further that some of them--I had a lot of, genuine greasy last-century things--had served their time, a hundred years ago, on living, world-stained men and women; on figures not perhaps so far removed, in that vanished world, from THEIR type, the Monarchs', QUOI! of a breeched and bewigged age. "We'll put, on anything that FITS," said the Major. "Oh I arrange that--they fit in the pictures." "I'm afraid I should do better for the modern books. I'd come as you like," said Mrs. Monarch. "She has got a lot of clothes at home: they might do for contemporary life," her husband continued. "Oh I can fancy scenes in which you'd be quite natural." And indeed I could see the slipshod re-arrangements of stale properties--the stories I tried to produce pictures for without the exasperation of reading them--whose sandy tracts the good lady might help to people. But I had to return to the fact that--for this sort of work--the daily mechanical grind--I was already equipped: the people I was working with were fully adequate. "We only thought we might be more like SOME characters," said Mrs. Monarch mildly, getting up.