the dish; champignons, which even a purist for Saxon
English would have hesitated to address as mushrooms, had contributed
their languorous atrophied bodies to the garnishing, and a sauce
devised in the twilight reign of the Fifteenth Louis had been summoned
back from the imperishable past to take its part in the wonderful
confection. Thus far had human effort laboured to achieve the desired
result; the rest had been left to human genius--the genius of Aristide
Saucourt.

"And now the moment had arrived for the serving of the great dish, the
dish which world-weary Grand Dukes and market-obsessed money magnates
counted among their happiest memories. And at the same moment
something else happened. The leader of the highly salaried orchestra
placed his violin caressingly against his chin, lowered his eyelids,
and floated into a sea of melody.

"'Hark!' said most of the diners, 'he is playing "The Chaplet."'

"They knew it was 'The Chaplet' because they had heard it played at
luncheon and afternoon tea, and at supper the night before, and had not
had time to forget.

"'Yes, he is playing "The Chaplet,"' they reassured one another. The
general voice was unanimous on the subject. The orchestra had already
played it eleven times that day, four times by desire and seven times
from force of habit, but the familiar strains were greeted with the
rapture due to a revelation. A murmur of much humming rose from half
the tables in the room, and some of the more overwrought listeners laid
down knife and fork in order to be able to burst in with loud clappings
at the earliest permissible moment.

"And the Canetons a la mode d'Ambleve? In stupefied, sickened wonder
Aristide watched them grow cold in total neglect, or suffer the almost
worse indignity of perfunctory pecking and listless munching while the
banqueters lavished their approval and applause on the music-makers.
Calves' liver and bacon, with parsley sauce, could hardly have figured
more ignominiously in the evening's entertainment. And while the
master of culinary art leaned back against the sheltering pillar,
choking with a horrible brain-searing rage that could find no outlet
for its agony, the orchestra leader was bowing his acknowledgments of
the hand-clappings that rose in a storm around him. Turning to his
colleagues he nodded the signal for an encore. But before the violin
had been lifted anew into position there came from the shadow of the
pillar an explo