The August day was hot and lifeless.  Heat mist lay over the park, and over the gardens on the slopes of Campden Hill.  Doris could hardly drag her weary feet along, as she walked from where the omnibus had set her down to her uncle’s studio.  But it was soon evident that within the studio itself there was animation enough.  From the long passage approaching it Doris heard someone shouting—­declaiming—­what appeared to be verse.  Madame, of course, reciting her own poems—­poor Uncle Charles!  Doris stopped outside the door, which was slightly open, to listen, and heard these astonishing lines—­delivered very slowly and pompously, in a thick, strained voice: 

     “My heart is adamant!  The tear-drops drip and drip—­
     Force their slow path, and tear their desperate way. 
     The vulture Pain sits close, to snip—­and snip—­and snip
     My sad, sweet life to ruin—­well-a-day! 
     I am deceived—­a bleating lamb bereft!—­who goes
     Baa-baaing to the moon o’er lonely lands. 
     Through all my shivering veins a tender fervour flows;
     I cry to Love—­’Reach out, my Lord, thy hands! 
     And save me from these ugly beasts who ramp and rage
     Around me all day long—­beasts fell and sore—­
     Envy, and Hate, and Calumny!—­do thou assuage
     Their impious mouths, O splendid Love, and floor
     Their hideous tactics, and their noisome spleen,
     Withering to dust the awful “Might-Have-Been!"’”

“Goodness!  ‘Howls the Sublime’ indeed!” thought Doris, gurgling with laughter in the passage.  As soon as she had steadied her face she opened the studio door, and perceived Lady Dunstable’s prospective daughter-in-law standing in the middle of the studio, head thrown back and hands outstretched, invoking the Cyprian.  The shriek of the first lines had died away in a stage whisper; the reciter was glaring fiercely into vacancy.

Doris’s merry eyes devoured the scene.  On the chair from which the model had risen she had deposited yet another hat, so large, so audacious and beplumed that it seemed to have a positive personality, a positive swagger of its own, and to be winking roguishly at the audience.  Meanwhile Madame’s muslin dress of the day before had been exchanged for something more appropriate to the warmth of her poetry—­a tawdry flame-coloured satin, in which her “too, too solid” frame was tightly sheathed.  Her coal-black hair, tragically wild, looked as though no comb had been near it for a month, and the gloves drawn half-way up the bare arms hardly remembered they had ever been white.

A slovenly, dishevelled, vulgar woman, reciting bombastic nonsense!  And yet!—­a touch of Southern magnificence, even of Southern grace, amid the cockney squalor and finery.  Doris coolly recognised it, as she stood, herself invisible, behind her uncle’s large easel.  Thence she perceived also the other persons in the studio:—­Bentley sitting in front of the poetess, hiding his eyes with one hand, and nervously tapping the arm of his chair with the other; to the right of him—­seen sideways—­the lanky form, flushed face, and open mouth of young Dunstable; and in the far distance, Miss Wigram.