an undersized _geisha_!"

"But think of the millions of _yens_ or _sens_ or whatever they are,
with which she is going to re-gild the Brandan coronet!"

"That wouldn't console me for a yellow baby with slit eyes," continued
the General, his voice rising in debate as his custom was at the
Senior.

"Hush, General!" said his interlocutor, "we don't discuss such
possibilities."

"But everybody here must be thinking of them, except that unfortunate
young man."

"We never say what we are thinking, General; it would be too
upsetting."

"And we are to have a Japanese Lord Brandan, sitting in the House of
Lords?" the General went on.

"Yes, among the Jews, Turks, and Armenians, who are there already,"
Lady Rushworth answered, "an extra Oriental will never be noticed. It
will only be another instance of the course of Empire taking its way
Eastward."

* * * * *

In the Everington dining-room the wedding presents were displayed. It
looked more like the interior of a Bond Street shop where every kind
of _article de luxe_, useful and useless, was heaped in plenty.

Perhaps the only gift which had cost less than twenty pounds was Lady
Everington's own offering, a photograph of herself in a plain silver
frame, her customary present when one of her protegees was married
under her immediate auspices.

"My dear," she would say, "I have enriched you by several thousands of
pounds. I have introduced you to the right people for present-giving
at precisely the right moment previous to your wedding, when they know
you neither too little nor too much. By long experience I have
learnt to fix it to a day. But I am not going to compete with this
undistinguished lavishness. I give you my picture to stand in
your drawing-room as an artist puts his signature to a completed
masterpiece, so that when you look around upon the furniture, the
silver, the cut glass, the clocks, the engagement tablets, and the
tantalus stands, the offerings of the rich whose names you have
long ago forgotten, then you will confess to yourself in a burst of
thankfulness to your fairy godmother that all this would never have
been yours if it had not been for her!"

In a corner of the room and apart from the more ostentatious homage,
stood on a small table a large market-basket, in which was lying a
huge red fish, a roguish, rollicking mullet with a roving eye, all
made out of a soft crinkly silk. In the basket beneath it were ro