Nobody wants 'em! So let's
'cultivate our garden,' my dear, and be thankful. I'm beginning a new
picture--and I've found a topping new model. What can a man want more?
Very nice of you to let Arthur go, and have his head. Where is
it?--some smart moor? He'll soon be tired of it."
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.
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