frame, her customary present when one of her protégées 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