As the Sphinx’s silver fork rustled among the withered silver upon her plate, she turned to me and said: 

’Have you ever thought what beautiful little things these whitebait are?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I replied, ’they are the daisies of the deep sea, the threepenny-pieces of the ocean.’

‘You dear!’ said the Sphinx, who is alone in the world in thinking me awfully clever.  ’Go on, say something else, something pretty about whitebait—­there’s a subject for you!’

Then it was that, fortunately, I remembered my Pre-Raphaelite friend, and I sententiously remarked:  ’Of course, if one has anything to say one cannot do better than say it about whitebait....  Well, whitebait....’

But here, providentially, the band of the beef—­that is, the band behind the beef; that is, the band that nightly hymns the beef (the phrase is to be had in three qualities)—­struck up the overture from Tannhaeuser, which is not the only music that makes the Sphinx forget my existence; and thus, forgetting me, she momentarily forgot the whitebait.  But I remembered, remembered hard—­worked at pretty things, as metal-workers punch out their flowers of brass and copper.  The music swirled about us like golden waves, in which swam myriad whitebait, like showers of tiny stars, like falling snow.  To me it was one grand processional of whitebait, silver ripples upon streams of gold.

The music stopped.  The Sphinx turned to me with the soul of Wagner in her eyes, and then she turned to the waiter:  ‘Would it be possible,’ she said, ’to persuade the bandmaster to play that wonderful thing over again?’

The waiter seemed a little doubtful, even for the Sphinx, but he went off to the bandmaster with the air of a man who has at last an opportunity to show that he can dare all for love.  Personally, I have a suspicion that he poured his month’s savings at the bandmaster’s feet, and begged him to do this thing for the most wonderful lady in the world; or perhaps the bandmaster was really a musician, and his musician’s heart was touched—­lonely there amid the beef—­to think that there was really some one, invisible though she were to him, some shrouded silver presence, up there among the beefeaters, who really loved to hear great music.  Perhaps it was thus made a night he has never forgotten; perhaps it changed the whole course of his life—­who knows?  The sweet reassuring request may have come to him at a moment when, sick at heart, he was deciding to abandon real music for ever, and settle down amid the beef and the beef-music of Old England.

Well, however it was, the waiter came back radiant with a ‘Yes’ on every shining part of him, and if the Tannhaeuser had been played well at first, certainly the orchestra surpassed themselves this second time.

When the great jinnee of music had once more swept out of the hall, the Sphinx turned with shining eyes to the waiter: 

‘Take,’ she said, ’take these tears to the bandmaster.  He has indeed earned them.’