I took the Monarchs into my confidence, I told them frankly what I
was about, I mentioned my embarrassments and alternatives. "Oh
take HIM!" Mrs. Monarch murmured sweetly, looking at her husband;
and "What could you want better than my wife?" the Major inquired
with the comfortable candour that now prevailed between us.

I wasn't obliged to answer these remarks--I was only obliged to
place my sitters. I wasn't easy in mind, and I postponed a little
timidly perhaps the solving of my question. The book was a large
canvas, the other figures were numerous, and I worked off at first
some of the episodes in which the hero and the heroine were not
concerned. When once I had set THEM up I should have to stick to
them--I couldn't make my young man seven feet high in one place and
five feet nine in another. I inclined on the whole to the latter
measurement, though the Major more than once reminded me that he
looked about as young as any one. It was indeed quite possible to
arrange him, for the figure, so that it would have been difficult
to detect his age. After the spontaneous Oronte had been with me a
month, and after I had given him to understand several times over
that his native exuberance would presently constitute an
insurmountable barrier to our further intercourse, I waked to a
sense of his heroic capacity. He was only five feet seven, but the
remaining inches were latent. I tried him almost secretly at
first, for I was really rather afraid of the judgement my other
models would pass on such a choice. If they regarded Miss Churm as
little better than a snare what would they think of the
representation by a person so little the real thing as an Italian
street-vendor of a protagonist formed by a public school?

If I went a little in fear of them it wasn't because they bullied