“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 rolls and rolls of plain silk, red and white.  This was an offering from the Japanese community in London, the conventional wedding present of every Japanese home from the richest to the poorest, varying only in size and splendour.  On another small table lay a bundle of brown objects like prehistoric axe heads, bound round with red and white string, and vaguely odorous of bloater-paste.  These were dried flesh of the fish called katsuobushi by the Japanese, whose absence also would have brought misfortune to the newly married.  Behind them, on a little tray, stood a miniature landscape representing an aged pine-tree by the sea-shore and a little cottage with a couple of old, old people standing at its door, two exquisite little dolls dressed in rough, poor kimonos, brown and white.  The old man holds a rake, and the old woman holds a broom.  They have very kindly faces and white silken hair.  Any Japanese would recognise them at once as the Old People of Takasago, the personification of the Perfect Marriage.  They are staring with wonder and alarm at the Brandan sapphires, a monumental parure designed for the massive state of some Early-Victorian Lady Brandan.