My next sister, Saccharine, was of a filmy and prismatic beauty that was sufficient evidence of her Cohltar origin--our mother, of course, was a Cohltar. I never thought her mind the equal of my own. Indeed, at the moment of going to press I have not yet met the mind that I thought the equal of my own. But about her beauty there was no doubt. In those days--I am speaking of the 'nineties--it was quite an ordinary event for my sister, inadvertently, to hold up an omnibus. The horses pulled up as soon as they saw her, and refused to move until they had drunk their fill of her astounding beauty. I well remember one occasion on which the horses in a West Kensington omnibus met her at Piccadilly Circus and refused to leave her until she reached Highgate, in spite of the whip of the driver, the blasphemy of the conductor, the more formal complaints of the passengers, and direct police intervention. She was a sweet girl in those days, and I loved her. I never had any feelings of jealousy. How can one who is definitely assured of superiority to everybody be jealous of anybody? She married a Russian, Alexis Chopitoff. He was a perfect artist in his own medium, which happened to be hair. It is to him that I owe what is my only beauty, and I am assured that it defies detection. At one time life's greatest prizes seemed to be within his reach. During the war his skill in rendering the _chevelure_ of noted pianists fit for military service attracted official attention, and if he had been made O.B.E. it would have come as no surprise to any of us. Unhappily his interest in the political affairs of his own country led him to annex at Waterloo a despatch-case which, pedantically speaking, did not belong to him. The case unfortunately happened to contain a diamond tiara, and this led to misunderstandings. Nothing could have exceeded the courage of dear Saccharine when she learned that at the end of his sentence he was to be deported. "It will leave me," she said, with perfect calm and in words that have since become historical, "in a position of greater freedom and less responsibility." But I knew how near she was to a nervous breakdown. Indeed, nervous breakdown was her successful defence when, a week later, she was arrested at Whiteridge's with a tin of sardines, two cakes of super-cream toilet-soap, and a bound copy of Keble's "Christian Year" in her muff. The malice and animosity that Whiteridge's showed in the prosecution are but partly excused by the fact that dear Saccharine had pinched the muff first.