Mr. Meander, the poet, discovered that all the beautiful heads were like Miss Fitzherbert.  ‘It is the same line,’ he exclaimed, ’the line of lilies and flowing waters—­the gracious ineffable upward returning ripple of the true retrousse nose, the divine flou, the loveliness which has lain dormant for centuries—­nay, was at one period of debased art scorned and trampled under foot by the porcine multitude, as akin to the pug and the turn-up, until discovered and enshrined on the altar of the Beautiful by the Boticelli Revivalists.’

Miss Fitzherbert simpered, and accepted these remarks as mere statements of obvious fact.  She was accustomed to hear of Boticelli and the early Italian painters in connection with her own charms of face and figure.

Lesbia, whose faultless features were of the aquiline type, regarded the bard’s rhapsody as insufferable twaddle, and began to think Mr. Smithson almost a wit when he made fun of the bard.

Smithson was enchanted when she laughed at his jokelets, even although she did not scruple to tell him that she thought his favourite pictures detestable, and looked with the eye of indifference on a collection of jade that was worth a small fortune.

Mr. Meander fell into another rhapsody over those classic cups and shallow little bowls of absinthe-coloured jade.

‘Here if you like, are colour and beauty,’ he murmured, caressing one of the little cups with the roseate tips of his supple fingers.  ’These, dearest Smithson, are worth all the rest of your collection; worth vanloads of your cloisonne enamels, your dragon-jars in blood-colour and blue.  This cloudy indefinable substance, not crudely transparent nor yet distinctly opaque, a something which touches the boundary line of two worlds—­the real and the ideal.  And then the colour!  Great heaven, can anything be lovelier than this shadowy tint which is neither yellow nor green; faint, faint as the dawn of newly-awakened day?  After the siege of blood-bedabbled Delhi, Baron Rothschild sent a special agent to India to buy him a little jade tea-pot which had been the joy of Eastern Kings.  Only a tea-pot.  Yet Rothschild deemed it worth a voyage from England to India.  That is what the love of the beautiful means, in Jew or Gentile,’ concluded the bard, smiling on the company, as they gathered round the Florentine table on which the jade specimens were set out, Lady Kirkbank looking at the little cups and basins as if she thought they were going to do something, after all this fuss had been made about them.  It seemed hardly credible that any reasonable being could have given thirty guineas for one of those bits of greenish-yellow clouded glass, unless the thing had some peculiar property of expansion or contraction.