aside all my model studies and beg others from my volunteers so that now there are figures on the canvas as large as life and several times as national, Mrs F. D. . The Misses Barnard, Lady Eccles, Lady Blomfield, Mrs Phil May, Mary de Navarro (Mary Anderson) and several others. Sixteen figures in all. (And when I say as large as life I really mean larger than life for they are 7'6" high). Well the canvas is now about completed and I am planning to come over and see that it looks right in place. If I do come I shall be there before Christmas and will certainly look you up if for nothing else for the satisfaction of giving you a small piece of my alleged mind for coming to London this summer without giving me an opportunity of letting you decline an invitation to visit us here. I know how busy one is when he makes a brief visit abroad and I also know that on occasion it is a relief to come to the country for a day. And I have a secret belief and an open hope that both you and your wife will sometime find your way here and get that ?? ?? When once that ?? has entered the system he is there to stay and the visitor always returns and returns again.

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I was going to try to remember all I could about the picture "How the Gossip Grew." It occurred to me to paint it one summer when we had a house full of people. I never take afternoon tea but while I was at work I could always hear the rise and fall of the tea chatter as the ladies MET ?? under the sycamore tree on the lawn and, under the guise of tea drinking, discussed the TIMELY?? topics of the season. I made the composition at first of several figures but at last eliminated all the unnecessary personages and left the question in the hands of two, or rather on the tongues of two. Austin Dobson was staying with us at the time and when I had made the composition and we were discussing a title for it (Mine was simply "Gossip") Dobson said "Call it 'How the Gossip Grew'". And so the picture was named. I began the figure of the girl on the left from a Miss Nellie Brown a model, now an artist. But as I was unable to finish the picture before the time came when I usually went to New York I took both the canvas and the model with me and kept both until spring. Arrived in New York,

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