“We’ve been trying on the clothes,” said geranium-red Ruby. “It took an awful time to make up our minds. I chose this.” She opened her wide, black-bordered sleeves like a red butterfly, and turned on her hips to show him the great black wings of her sash. Her cheeks were flushed a deep crimson with her enjoyment, and he wondered if, with that and the advantage that her magnificent figure got from the half-revealing silk, she did not almost eclipse her slenderer companion. He turned round, with a view to the formation of a considered judgment. Lychnis, the last golden comb stuck in her hair, stood up, and the wrap that had swathed her shoulders fell to the ground. She, too, had a faint flush, knowing, perhaps, that she was offered for judgment; or had she used, he wondered, a little pigment from the porcelain tray? She turned slowly for him to admire her. She wore a chrysanthemum robe—dusky flowers on a ground of pale amber. Her neck—as Quentin was wont to say, you could break it by clenching the hand—was a chrysanthemum stalk. The big bow at the small of her back gathered her robe in and disclosed the slim, womanish swell of her hips that he had so often tried to describe. She raised her robe slightly, to display trousers of some texture crisp and brown, like the petals of the flower. “And these comic shoes.” She pointed to them, and walked towards him, putting her feet one before the other in tiny steps. “Must we walk like that? Ruby’s beautiful when she does it. Am I?” They were lovely, and friendly, those two young women. He watched them both imitate the swaying and delicate walk of the Chinese girls, up and down the room, while the maid put away the clothes, paying no attention. “You’ll turn into Chineses,” he warned them. They both sprang at him with cries of “Never!” and pushed and pulled him from the room and along a corridor just to show what they could do. But Lychnis abruptly desisted. “Hark! What’s that?” It was a carillon of silver bells pealing in a tower of porcelain, calling the Sages from their several retreats to a meal in the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion. Lord Sombrewater and Sir Richard Frew-Gaff, clothed respectively in sunset crimson and turquoise-blue, were already seated in a chamber more sumptuous, but not less elegant, than the bedchamber. It was furnished with rich tables, and flowers, and great jars of finest blue-and-white porcelain. The other Sages arriving, changed likewise into robes of the most brilliant hue, refreshment was served in the shape of fragrant tea, with a dish of cooked bamboo shoots and other more doubtful ingredients. “I shan’t examine this,” said Quentin. “It smells good, and I’ll risk the transformation of my lusts that may result from ingesting the cellular composition of beetles and slugs.” “An insubstantial diet will do you no harm,” said Sir Richard. “If I were to drain you of blood and transfuse the sap of a vegetable, it might render your temperament less—shall I say?—ardent.”