Explore "The Nether Millstone" by Fred M. White on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Connie refused to be drawn into further conversation for the present. She was very busy touching up certain sketches which she informed Mary were intended to illustrate the pages of a popular lady's novelette, the published price of which was a halfpenny. They were dreadful drawings, as Mary could see, grotesque exaggerations of the work of George Du Maurier, impossibly tall females, with regular doll-like features and long lashes, with men of the same type. Five drawings went to each novelette, and the price paid was thirty shillings.
"As a matter of fact they are not mine," Connie explained, as she put the finishing touches to the figure of a severely classical duchess; "they are the work of a friend. She has been very ill lately and her work has fallen off in consequence. This lot would have been rejected by the editor, only I happen to know his assistant, who suggested that I should take them back and patch them up before they came under the eagle eye of the proprietor. I can get the money for them this evening, and tell Grace that the editor asked me to bring it along."