Miss Ray Dumont is a very humorous young woman, who got into the business of of making child mannequins just about the time Lester Gaba was doing soap sculptures at a good, lively clip.

Ask her what made go into designing child mannequins and sh'll laugh, and say it was because she did know enough to keep out of it.

That makes it sound as if it were a risky business, with lots of grief. But you can't listen to her five minutes without realizing that it is, on the contrary and as the saying goes, more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

(Though one wonders idly what an actual barrel of monkeys would really be like.)

Well, anyhow, Miss Dumont, who looks and walks like Amelia Earhart and works in overalls - blue jeans overalls - was doing fashion drawings, and she looked around and got the idea that the child mannequins in the store windows were pretty awful looking brats, and did nothing to warm the public heart toward the clothes they had on.

They went in for realism, too, and were all curves and dimples, arranged in a design you never beheld in a human child walking about in two legs.

Miss Dumont went to Paris on some fashion errands and it came to her that the children she saw were bonnes in the Bois and the gardens around Versailles were, "Well, shall we say, more inviting than the American children selected for the models of conventional American mannequins?"

So when she came home, she set to work to see if she could design some mannequins that would look like the fashion sketches of French children.

By looking around intently she found some to use for models, too. They were neighbor children up in the country, where she spent what holiday time she could - up in the hills back of Schenectady - and they look very much more real and inviting than any she has seen modeled into mannequins.

(She laughs now; at the time a neighbor child, who name was Jeannette; now Jeannette is grown up and poses for comercial artis who have need of a debutante model.)

She didn't mean to make her mannequins portraits, only impressions. She thought there had been enough realism for one generation. So there could be no wholesale designs.

Each mannequin would be an individual creation. Each was to be carved out of wood by hand, by girls skilled in wood sculpture and then covered with suede or chamois which gives a nice "flesh tone" on which to apply the complexion tinting, the indication of the eyes, and so on.

The hair? Well, for some wooden mannequins - purposely made out of wood and varished, not covered softly with suede or chamois, because they were to wear simple wash dresses and be, distinctly, roughish and out of doors, she had used shavings for the hair, and the whole was very humorous indeed.

But for the suede-covered models, who wear the more sophisticated clothes, the hair is made out of a beigey cream wool curled and curlicued around, plastered close to the head in a semi-conventionalized way which is very fetching and yet doesn't look like a movie brat, all curled and kinked within an inch of its life.