He also had remembered her birthday and he had a small offering in his pocket, but he could not give it to her before the others.  Schreiermeyer would probably insist on looking at it and would guess its value, whereas Logotheti was sure that Margaret would not.  He would give it to her when they were alone, and would tell her that it was nothing but a seal for her writing-case, a common green stone of some kind with a little Greek head on it; and she would look at it and think it pretty, and take it, because it did not look very valuable to her unpractised eye.  But the ‘common green stone’ was a great emerald, and the ‘little Greek head’ was an intaglio of Anacreon, cut some two thousand and odd hundred years ago by an art that is lost; and the setting had been made and chiselled for Maria de’ Medici when she married Henry the Fourth of France.  Logotheti liked to give Margaret things vastly more rare than she guessed them to be.

Margaret offered her visitors tea, and she and Logotheti took theirs while the others looked on or devoured the cake and bread and butter.

‘Tea?’ repeated Signor Stromboli.  ’I am well.  Why should I take tea?  The tea is for to perspire when I have a cold.’

The Signorina Baci-Roventi laughed at him.

’Do you not know that the English drink tea before dinner to give themselves an appetite?’ she asked.  ’It is because they drink tea that they eat so much.’

‘All the more,’ answered Stromboli.  ’Do you not see that I am fat?  Why should I eat more?  Am I to turn into a monument of Victor Emanuel?’

‘You eat too much bread,’ said Schreiermeyer in a resentful tone.

‘It is my vice,’ said the tenor, taking up four thin slices of bread and butter together and popping them all into his mouth without the least difficulty.  ‘When I see bread, I eat it.  I eat all there is.’

‘We see you do,’ returned Schreiermeyer bitterly.

’I cannot help it.  Why do they bring bread?  They are in league to make me fat.  The waiters know me.  I go into the Carlton; the head-waiter whispers; a waiter brings a basket of bread; I eat it all.  I go into Boisin’s, or Henry’s; the head-waiter whispers; it is a basket of bread; while I eat a few eggs, a chicken, a salad, a tart or two, some fruit, cheese, the bread is all gone.  I am the tomb of all the bread in the world.  So I get fat.  There,’ he concluded gravely, ’it is as I tell you.  I have eaten all.’

And in fact, while talking, he had punctuated each sentence with a tiny slice or two of thin bread and butter, and everybody laughed, except Schreiermeyer, as the huge singer gravely held up the empty glass dish and showed it.

‘What do you expect of me?’ he asked.  ’It is a vice, and I am not Saint Anthony, to resist temptation.’

‘Perhaps,’ suggested Fraeulein Ottilie timidly, ’if you exercised a little strength of character—­’

‘Exercise?’ roared Stromboli, not understanding her, for they spoke a jargon of Italian, German, and English.  ’Exercise?  The more I exercise, the more I eat!  Ha, ha, ha!  Exercise, indeed!  You talk like crazy!’