I had secured a corner table at a reasonable distance from the band, which occupies a platform about half-way down the room, and we enthroned the little cousin on the chair in the angle, so that she could see everybody and everything in the room. Every table but one was occupied, and that I knew was reserved for the beautiful young man whom we had left looking with a frown at cupid's finger. My little French cousin was in high spirits, and Robert acted as an amiable chorus. She recognised that the room was French--it is a copy of one of the salons at Fontainebleau, and perceived that the pictures of cupids, which are between the round windows and the tall casemented glasses, were inspired by Boucher. She liked the carved marble mantelpiece and the crystal and gold electroliers. I was called upon to tell her who everybody was at the other tables, and I launched out recklessly into fiction. I knew by sight a dozen of our fellow-diners, and the rest I described as M.P.'s and ladies of title, officers of the Household Brigade, and divettes of the Gaiety, Daly's, the Lyric, and the Shaftesbury, which they probably are, celebrated painters and prima donnas, according to their appearance. My British cousin choked over a bone of the trout, so he said, but my little French cousin and her spouse were much impressed by my exhaustive acquaintance with all the celebrities of my native city, which was just the effect I wished to produce. Little Oddenino, going the round of the tables, saying a word or two to all his clientele, came to our corner, asked if all was as it should be, took up the menu, and lifted his eyebrows. Of course I know that to follow the _noisettes_ by ham was inartistic, but being in the vein of romance I said that my little French cousin was passionately fond of ham, and demanded it at all her meals, and not that I prefer ham to mutton, which would have been the truth. The little man bowed and smiled and passed on; My cousin asked who he was, and when I replied, "Oddy," she inquired if it was he who would presently make the rag-time. Pleased to be on bed-rock truth at last I gave her a shorthand sketch of Oddenino's career; how Turin is his native town; how he opened one of the great hotels at Cimiez, and earned the thanks of the late Queen Victoria and a fine tie-pin when she stayed there; how he was manager of the East Room at the Criterion, and of the Café Royal, and from the latter restaurant stepped two doors farther down Regent Street and built the Imperial Restaurant. I described story upon story of banqueting-rooms that are to be found on the Glasshouse Street side, and how Freemasons--good, charitable British Freemasons, not troublesome political French Freemasons--feast in them in great numbers every night in the year. I sketched out the little man's other ventures, and I ended by telling her that Oddenino is a man of much consideration in the Italian colony in London, and has been decorated by his king.