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 _Tannhäuser_,
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