Meanwhile I found myself trying to invent types that approached her own, instead of making her own transform itself--in the clever way that was not impossible for instance to poor Miss Churm.

Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would, she always came out, in my pictures, too tall--landing me in the dilemma of having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which (out of respect perhaps to my own very much scantier inches) was far from my idea of such a personage.
The case was worse with the Major--nothing I could do would keep HIM down, so that he became useful only for the representation of brawny giants.

I adored variety and range, I cherished human accidents, the illustrative note; I wanted to characterise closely, and the thing in the world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type.

I had quarrelled with some of my friends about it; I had parted company with them for maintaining that one HAD to be, and that if the type was beautiful--witness Raphael and Leonardo--the servitude was only a gain.
I was neither Leonardo nor Raphael--I might only be a presumptuous young modern searcher; but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner than character.

When they claimed that the obsessional form could easily BE character I retorted, perhaps superficially, "Whose ?" It couldn't be everybody's--it might end in being nobody's.
After I had drawn Mrs.Monarch a dozen times I felt surer even than before that the value of such a model as Miss Churm resided precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course with the other fact that what she did have was a curious and inexplicable talent for imitation.