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