Every member arrives with a woman in mind and leaves the first sitting with three different ones. The generator is not being fickle; it is being literal. A brief composed from memory is a brief rewritten each time, and the differences — auburn for chestnut, waves for the chignon — are precisely the differences between a muse and a stranger. The remedy is administrative, which is to say permanent: write her down.
The five lines
A dossier that holds has five entries, always in the same order. Age, stated as a number and never below twenty-five, because “young-looking” is an argument you do not want to have with a model or a moderator. Hair, with colour, length and its usual arrangement — “dark chestnut, drawn into a low chignon” survives a hundred sittings; “elegant hair” survives none. Build, in two or three words. Face, with one or two durable features. And the signature: the gold cuff, the particular ring, the mark by the collarbone — the detail that identifies her in a thumbnail and survives every crop.
Everything not on those five lines is the evening, and the evening is supposed to change: the gown, the room, the hour, the light. The discipline is simply never to let the evening edit the dossier.
Keeping it across a year
Two habits keep a dossier honest. Keep it in one place, as text you paste rather than prose you retype — memory edits, pasteboards do not. And when she genuinely changes — a new hair arrangement adopted as a season’s direction — record it as a new edition of the dossier, dated, so that earlier work can still be reproduced and later work can be told from it.
The club’s counsel on faults is equally plain. When a sitting comes back unlike her, the cause is almost never the model: either an evening line contradicted a dossier line, or a dossier line was too vague to hold. Tighten the line; do not chase the render.
What a dossier cannot do
It cannot decide the woman for you. A dossier of compliments — striking, flawless, unforgettable — describes everyone and therefore no one. Decide her on paper, plainly and particularly, and the five lines will do the rest: she will walk out of every sitting as herself.