Mr. Murray gave her some papers to sign, and she wrote her name blindly without looking to see what she was putting her signature to.

“Miss Mallow is a trusting person, John,” Dammler chided upon seeing this, and Murray made a joking reply which went unheard, and consequently unanswered, by Miss Mallow.

One thought was uppermost in her mind. She had not complimented Dammler, and that she was determined to do. “I have read all your poems,” she said in a stricken voice. “I liked them very much.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he replied. As she said nothing further, he went on in the interest of civility to add mendaciously, “and I read the book you so kindly sent me, and liked it very much indeed. We writers must stick together and praise each other, must we not?”

“Yes,” she said, and thought to herself-he’s lying. How well he lies. She could see that the visit, an unparalleled chance for making a favourable impression on Dammler, was going poorly. Not a word could she think of to say. But the meeting soon took a turn for the worse. Uncle Clarence, alerted by a servant as to who had come to call, came dashing into the saloon, a white rag in his hands with which he wiped paint from his fingers.

“Lord Dammler, indeed this is an honour,” he said in a sonorous voice, without waiting for an introduction. “My niece has been telling me all about you.” He grabbed Dammler’s hand and pumped furiously.

“This is my uncle, Mr. Elmtree,” Prudence said helplessly, and from that one speech on, she couldn’t have got a word in if she had wanted to. Dammler’s works, which Clarence had never read, were praised to the skies. Shakespeare, Milton-all those fellows were nothing to him. From Lord Dammler he turned to his niece’s works. There was no danger of her being Wilma’s daughter today. They too were admired, unread, as being the only thing in the English language capable of comparison to Dammler’s cantos. “I don’t give praise lightly,” he added in a judicial manner. “I have no opinion of books in general-go a year at a time without opening a book-but serious literature of the sort you two write is always a pleasure to read. Yes, I will certainly read Cantos from Abroad. Read them again,” he amended, as Lord Dammler’s mouth fell open at this conclusion to his long encomium.

The poet indicated by a slight jerk of his head to Murray that he would like to leave. Appalled at the meeting, Prudence did nothing to detain them.

“Oh, a glass of wine. Surely you will do me the honour to take a glass of wine before you leave,” Clarence said. He gave no chance for refusal, but pulled a cord and summoned a servant to fetch it at once.

The delay gave Clarence a chance to mount his own hobby horse. “Are you interested in art at all, my lord?” he asked the guest.

“Yes, indeed. I saw some very fine pieces in Greece,” Dammler answered, thinking to get over the next quarter of an hour with a good discussion of art. The poor fellow was a fool on the subject of literature, but might know something of art, as he had raised the subject.

“Oh, Greece, there is nothing there but rubble,” Clarence informed him, dismissing at a word the entire classical heritage. Dammler stared, and a smile slowly formed on his face.

“Indeed?” he said in his most drawling, affected voice.

“Smashed to bits, all of it. You’ve seen those pitiful broken bits and pieces Elgin had carted home. A scandal. The man is senile, not a doubt of it. No, when I say art I refer to painting.”

“Ah, yes, painting. Well, I spent some time in Italy. Rome is worth seeing, and Florence of course…"

No mere tourist was to take the floor. “I daresay you are familiar with the Mona Lisa?”

“Yes,” Dammler answered, slow to give up hope, and thinking still to hear some esoteric bit of history or lore connected with the famous painting.

“It’s by da Vinci,” Clarence told him in a knowing way.

Dammler's smile reappeared, accompanied now by a wicked twinkle in his one visible eye. “So I hear,” he agreed in an encouraging tone.

“I believe our guests are in a hurry, Uncle,” Prudence mentioned.

“Not at all,” Dammler contradicted.

“Hurry? Nonsense, we are discussing art. Ah, here is the wine. How pleasant it is to sit chatting with cultured gentlemen who are interested in something other than politics and the price of corn.”

“You were saying something about the Mona Lisa,” his guest reminded him. Murray frowned an apology at Prudence, and accepted a glass of wine.

“Yes, so I was. It is a wonderful painting, the Mona Lisa. La Gioconda the dagos call it.” Miss Mallow’s heart sank to her shoes, but there was to be no escape. “Clever the way da Vinci set up the model so he wouldn’t have to paint her 'head-on.' That is the most difficult pose to paint because of fore-shortening. The whole thing has to be foreshortened from that angle-dashed tricky business. And he cut her off just below the waist, too, to eliminate the problem of proportion. When you get into a full length portrait you have proportion to contend with. He avoided all that by posing her cleverly and cutting her off at the waist. I sometimes use that pose myself when I am in a hurry.”

“You do some painting yourself, do you, Mr. Elmtree?" Dammler asked with a show of interest.

“I dabble a little. Not professional, you know, but the way you dabble in rhyming. Just for my own enjoyment.”

“Just so,” the premier poet of England agreed.

“Yes, I did a likeness of my niece a while ago. Something on the lines of the Mona Lisa. But I gave Prudence an eyelash, of course…“ He rambled on with his stunt of using a symbol, and Lawrence’s jealousy of him, the incredible speed of eighty-seven portraits a year. Each of his follies was dragged out before Murray finally pulled Dammler away, protesting that the visit was too short.

“A man like that is better than a week at a spa,” Dammler said as they walked to the carriage. “I had some fear the English eccentric was a dead species, but I am happy to see he is alive and well and living in Grosvenor Square.”

Back in the house, Clarence turned to his niece and said, “Well, well, he seemed a pretty nice fellow, your new beau.”

“He is not a beau, Uncle,” Prudence replied, defeat in every line of her body.

“Ho, you are a sly puss. Nabbing a marquis under our very noses. Not a beau, indeed. Wait till I tell Mrs. Hering and Sir Alfred.”

“I wish you would not…”

“Nonsense, I am not ashamed to know him. He is a capital fellow. Knows all about art. I shall drop him a note and ask him if he would like to pose for me.”

“Oh, Uncle, indeed you must not!”

“I can slip him in between the Purdy twins and Mrs. Mulgrove-a week Monday I can start. Monday to Wednesday-three days. He will be no work at all. It will take very little fixing up to make him look well on canvas. He has a fine eyelash-pity about the patch, but I will paint that out, of course.”

Mr. Elmtree could not understand why his niece went into a fit of desperate giggles, but charitably assumed it was due to her great luck in nabbing Lord Dammler for a beau. He was dismayed he had forgotten to get the fellow’s address to drop him a line for his appointment. Prudence did not mention the efficacy of Mr. Murray as an intermediary, and the subject dropped.

Chapter 4

The following week was a calm one for Miss Mallow, allowing her to catch her breath after her spate of public life. She sat home working most days and went with Uncle Clarence and her mama to one very dull dinner party and with an aged female friend of her uncle to a concert of antique music. Lord Dammler was feted at Carlton House by the Prince Regent, found that an unknown young female had smuggled herself into his apartment during his absence one evening and was waiting for him in his bedroom, was requested to write a comedy for presentation at Drury Lane, won a thousand pounds at faro, enjoyed a flirtation with Lady Margaret Halston, and was presented with a paternity suit for a child conceived while he was still in America, by a girl who knew his reputation but not his itinerary. It was a calm week for him, too.

On Friday evening he stopped at Lady Melvine’s to take her to a rout he would prefer to have missed. He found her dressed and ready, a hideous purple turban on her head and an excess of diamonds sparkling about her person.

“Setting up as a shop window, Het?” he quizzed her.

“Don’t I look horrid? But I haven’t a stitch to wear, and the diamonds detract attention from this old gown, don’t you think?”

“They certainly detract from your elegance. Nothing is so vulgar as too many diamonds. You don’t need both the necklace and that awful cluster of brooches, do you?”

“No matter, when I walk in with you I will be the envy of them all.”

“You forget I have a reputation to maintain, Auntie.”

“The reason I am so ill prepared is that I have spent the whole afternoon reading another book by that Miss Mallow you recommended.”

“Oh, has she written more than one?”

‘Three-all delightful. The Cat in the Garden is the one I have just put down.”

“Sounds monstrously exciting,” he drawled, then yawned behind long fingers. “Is it about animals then?”

“No, it is a two-legged cat referred to in the title. An old tabby like me who lurks about her garden seeing things she shouldn’t, and telling.”

“Which she also shouldn’t. I’m surprised at such dissipation coming from Miss Mallow’s pen.”

“You cannot know her well!” Hettie laughed.

“Hardly at all. Don’t tell me you have her acquaintance."

"I've met her. Fanny Burney brought her to call on me last week, and sat with her lips pursed the whole visit at her protegée’s impertinence.”