eef (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.'

'Tears, little one!' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the
fishpools of your eyes!'

'Oh, yes, the whitebait,' rejoined the Sphinx, glad of a subject to hide
her emotion. 'Now tell me something nice about them, though the poor
little things have long since disappeared. Tell me, for instanc