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.
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