Doris laughed, let the question as to the “smart moor” pass, and came round to look at the new subject that Uncle Charles was laying in.  He explained it to her, well knowing that he spoke to unsympathetic ears, for whatever Doris might draw for her publishers, she was a passionate and humble follower of those modern experimentalists who have made the Slade School famous.  The subject was, it seemed, to be a visit paid to Joanna the mad and widowed mother of Charles V., at Tordesillas, by the envoys of Henry VII., who were thus allowed by Ferdinand, the Queen’s father, to convince themselves that the Queen’s profound melancholia formed an insuperable barrier to the marriage proposals of the English King.  The figure of the distracted Queen, crouching in white beside a window from which she could see the tomb of her dead and adored husband, the Archduke Philip, and some of the splendid figures of the English embassy, were already sketched.

“I have been fit to hang myself over her!” said Bentley, pointing to the Queen.  “I tried model after model.  At last I’ve got the very thing!  She comes to-day for the first time.  You’ll see her!  Before she comes, I must scrape out Joanna, so as to look at the thing quite fresh.  But I daresay I shall only make a few sketches of the lady to-day.”

“Who is she, and where did you get her!”

Bentley laughed.  “You won’t like her, my dear!  Never mind.  Her appearance is magnificent—­whatever her mind and morals may be.”

And he described how he had heard of the lady from an artist friend who had originally seen her at a music-hall, and had persuaded her to come and sit to him.  The comic haste and relief with which he had now transferred her to Bentley lost nothing in Bentley’s telling.  Of course she had “a fiend of a temper.”  “Wish you joy of her!  Oh, don’t ask me about her!  You’ll find out for yourself.”  “I can manage her,” said Uncle Charles tranquilly.  “I’ve had so many of ’em.”

“She is Spanish?”

“Not at all.  She is Italian.  That is to say, her mother was a Neapolitan, the daughter of a jeweller in Hatton Garden, and her father an English bank clerk.  The Neapolitans have a lot of Spanish blood in them—­hence, no doubt, the physique.”

“And she is a professional model!”

“Nothing of the sort!—­though she will probably become one.  She is a writer—­Heaven save the mark!—­and I have to pay her vast sums to get her.  It is the greatest favour.”

“A writer?”

“Poetess!—­and journalist!” said Uncle Charles, enjoying Doris’s puzzled look.  “She sent me her poems yesterday.  As to journalism”—­his eyes twinkled—­“I say nothing—­but this.  Watch her hats!  She has the reputation—­in certain circles—­of being the best-hatted woman in London.  All this I get from the man who handed her on to me.  As I said to him, it depends on what ‘London’ you mean.”

“Married?”