It is impossible to describe with how wild a heart, or thrilling a boding, the world heard this thing: eight days later the International Conference of Maritime Nations met at The Hague. But nothing happened--or the opposite of what was feared: for, as months passed, the _Boodah_, planted there in the ocean, rapidly became the recognized gathering-point of the fashion and gaiety of Europe, thither flocking the socially ambitious and the “arrived” together, and to have been invited to those revels of taste and elegance became a superiority. Gradually, as the names “Beech”, “Ecuador”, ceased to be associated with the islands, the name of Hogarth took their place; and Hogarth had engaged Wanda, sweetest of tenors, to a year's stay in the _Boodah_, whose orchestra was the most cultured anywhere; Roche, her _chef_, had two years previously been put into a laboratory to devote his soul to the enlargement of his art; and he and that tenor lived in suites of the _Boodah_ such as most princes would consider Utopian. Hardly anything in her interior suggested _the ship_: no hammocks for marines, rolling-racks, sick-bay, lockers, steam-tables, wash-rooms, she being just a palace planted in the Atlantic, her bottom going down to a layer of comparative calm, so that hardly ever, in a storm, when the ocean robed her sides in white, washed abroad her slippery plateau, and drenched with spray her lighthouse tops, did the ballroom below know shock or motion. Into her principal hall, far down, circular, one descended by a circle of steps of marble, round which stood a colonnade of Cuban cedar, supporting candelabra and silks; and from atrium-pools sunk in the floor twelve twining fountains brandished spiral sprays, the floor being of a glassy marble, polished with snakestone, suffused with blushes at the coloured silks and at a roof gross with rose and pomegranates, hanging chandeliers; round the raised centre of the floor stood two balustrades, three feet high, hung with silks, the inner circle thirty feet across, higher than the outer, forty-five across: a roseate room, strewn with cushions, colours, flushes; but that raised space was empty: reserved for--a throne. The throne, still unfinished, had been three years making in India.