"We’re really not equipped for having any one come to us," she apologized. "We’re scarcely unpacked. We’re going to move from this house anyhow when we can find another. It’s so poky. If we’re to entertain again—" She turned to her sister: "Mildred dear, _couldn’t_ some one have cleared these things away?" Waving her hand toward the array of potteries and porcelains, she continued to me: "One buys such a lot during two or three years abroad, doesn’t one? I’m sure Mrs. Soames must feel the way I do, that she doesn’t know where to put the things when she’s got them home." I knew the reason for the reference which others were as quick to catch as I, and, in the idiom of the moment, tried to "side-step" it by saying: "That’s a good thing—that Rouen _saladier_. You don’t often pick up one of that shape nowadays." "I saw it in an old shop at Dreux," Mrs. Averill informed me, in her melting tone. "I got this pair of Ming vases there, too. At least, they said they were Ming; but I don’t suppose they are. One is so taken in. But I liked them, whatever they are, and so—" She lifted one up and brought it to me—a dead-white jar, decorated with green foliage, violet-blue flowers, and tiny specks of red fruit. Something in me leaped. I took the vase in my hand as if it had been a child of my flesh and blood. I was far from thinking of my hearers as I said: "It’s not Ming; but it’s very good K’ang-hsi.’" I had thrown another little bomb into their camp, but it surprised them no more than it did me. A trance medium who hears himself speaking in a hitherto unknown tongue could not have been more amazed at his own utterance. I went on talking, not to give them information, but to listen for what I should say next. They had all three drawn near me. "How can you tell?" Miss Averill asked, partly in awe at my knowledge, and partly to give me the chance to display it. "Oh, very much as you can tell the difference between a hat you wear this year and one you wore five years ago. The styles are quite different. Ming corresponds roughly to the Tudor period in English history, and K’ang-hsi to the earlier Stuarts—with much the same distinction as we get between the output of those two epochs. Ming is older, bolder, stronger, rougher, with a kind of primitive force in it; K’ang-hsi is the product of a more refined civilization. It has less of the instinctive and more deliberate selection. It is more finished—more self-conscious." I picked up the Rouen salad-dish and a Sèvres cup and saucer, putting them side by side. "It’s something like the difference between these—strength and color and dash in the one, and in the other a more elaborately perfected art. You couldn’t be in any doubt, once you’d been in the habit of seeing them." Mrs. Averill’s question was as natural and spontaneous as laughter. "Where have you seen them so much, Mr. Soames?" "Oh, a little everywhere," I managed to reply, just as we were summoned to luncheon.