Sir Charles Snow was smoking strenuously, not in the big drawing-room, but in the pink-and-white absurdity which the servants called “the downstairs boudoir”—the big drawing-room’s near neighbor, almost annex—and that was worse, for the “boudoir’s” dainty, expensive fripperies were perfect caches for smoke-smell and smudge. But a man, at least an English man, has a right to do what he likes when a whole house is at sevens and sixes, every woman in it looking important, meals late, fires neglected, and men ignored or snubbed. “It is too damned still,” Snow grumbled irritably to his third cigar. Suddenly the big man jumped like a nerve-ridden woman—at least his heart did—at a sudden sound. But it was only a sympathetic tail thumping ingratiatingly at his feet. “Hello yourself!” Snow replied, glad even of a terrier to speak to. “_You’ve_ no business in here. Wait till my lady wife sees you—only, if you take my advice, Bimbles, you won’t, old boy.” Bimbles yapped a pleased reply. “Oh, all right,” Sir Charles retorted; “if you don’t care, I don’t.” Even a dog’s company was better than none. The door opened, and Emma hurried in—but before his wife had closed the door again, Snow had heard a tiny cry. “Well?” he demanded anxiously. Emma looked “bad,” he thought. And that wasn’t her way! His wife made no reply, except to sob and throw herself, almost vixenishly, in a chair. “Tell me,” he begged her brusquely. “Oh, Charlie, it is too terrible,” Emma wailed angrily. “Ivy?” Lady Snow shook her head. “All of us. It’s a Chinese baby.” Charles Snow looked at her with gloomy eyes. “The ugliest baby I ever saw. It isn’t like a baby. It’s like a hideous little Chinese god, and it looks ten thousand years old.” “Then it mustn’t,” Sir Charles remarked grimly; “only an emperor may look ten thousand years old.” “Well, then,” his wife retorted, “it looks twenty thousand. It hasn’t any eyes—just up-and-down wrinkled slits. It’s all cheek-bones and _yellow_—cheek-bones right up to its awful little eyebrows. It hasn’t any nose, and what it has is wider than its mouth, and those horrid up-and-down slits that I suppose are its eyes, if it _has_ any eyes, keep waggle-waggling all the time, blink, blink, blink.” Snow sighed, a smothered, dreary sigh. Emma’s description sounded Chinese enough. “Looks like Sên, then?” he said. “It does nothing of the kind!” Lady Snow stormed. “I tell you it is the most hideous, living thing I ever saw—and more Chinese-looking than any Chinaman I ever saw. It looks like Low Tease, or whatever you call him, when he was nine hundred years old, in those awful illustrated Chinese books of yours, and it looks twice as Chinese as Low Tease does.” “Lao Tze was a mere boy of two or three hundred when he died, dear,” Sir Charles murmured gently. “I don’t care!” Lady Snow snapped through her angry weeping. “It looks a disgrace! So there!” “Are you sure? Sure that Ivy’s baby looks so _very_ Chinese?”