March had come in like a lion, and continued to roar and bluster in leonine fashion to the very verge of April. A dry, dusty, bitter March, dealing largely in death and shipwreck. A villainous March, better calculated to inspire thoughts of suicide than even the fogs and creeping mists of November. But even this miserable March came to an end at last. The London season had begun. La Chicot was attracting not only medical students and lawyers’ clerks, the Stock Exchange and the War Office, but the fine flower of the aristocracy--the topmost strawberries in the basket--the Brobdingnagian Guardsmen, whose gloves were numbered nine and a half at the little hosier’s in Piccadilly, the dainty foplings who wore a lady’s six and three-quarters with four buttons, and who were beings of so frail and effeminate a type that a whisper through the telephone might blow them to the utmost ends of the earth. These opposite species, the athletics and the æsthetics, the hammer throwers, bicycle riders, boating men, hunting men, and pugilists, and the china collectors, art lunatics, and tame-cat section of society, met and mingled in the stalls at the Prince Frederick, and resembled each other in nothing except their appreciation of La Chicot. Mr. Smolendo produced a new ballet early in April, a ballet which was as ridiculous and generally imbecile in plot and purpose as most of its kind, but which for scenery, dresses, and effects was supposed to surpass anything that had ever been accomplished at his theatre. Everything in this ballet tended to the glorification of La Chicot. She was the central figure, the cynosure: every crest was lowered to give prominence to hers, principal dancers were her handmaidens, a hundred ballet-girls prostrated themselves before her throne, a hundred and fifty auxiliaries, specially engaged for this great spectacle, licked the dust beneath her feet. The final tableau, which was to cost Mr. Smolendo more money than he could calculate, was an apotheosis of La Chicot, a beautiful, bold, half-tipsy peasant, going to heaven on a telescopic arrangement of iron. It was a wonderful sight. The athletics called it ‘no end of jolly.’ The æsthetics described it as ‘unspeakably touching.’ This final tableau was supposed to represent the coral caves of the Indian Ocean. La Chicot was a mermaid who lured mariners to their doom beneath the wave. She lived in a jewelled cavern, a hall sparkling and shining with sapphires and emeralds and lapis-lazuli, all flooded with rainbow light, where she and her sister mermaidens, golden, glittering, and scaly, danced perpetually. Then came the end, and she floated upward through an ocean of blue gauze, in a moving frame of rosiest coral.