"Count," said Patricia plaintively, "no bouquets, please. I know when you are stringing me."
He looked blank and the Japanese officer hastily produced a lavender note-book and a gold pencil. "That is a new one," he said. "I must—what is it?—ah yes! I must nail it. Excuse me. I write it in my swear-album."
"The Viscount is learning American slang," Patricia informed Barbara. "One of these days you must tell him some of the very latest."
He looked across with gravely twinkling eyes. "I shall be—ah—tickle to die!" he said. "It is my specialty. Nex' year I become Professor in Slang Literature at the Imperial University."
The meal began merrily. Barbara sat on Daunt's left, with one of the attachés next her. Baroness Stroloff was on Daunt's other hand. Barbara remembered it afterward as a meal of elfish daintiness—of warm, pungent, wine-like liquor in blue porcelain bottles, of food of strange look and cloying taste, highly colored and seasoned, in a hundred tiny red and black lacquer dishes that carried her back to her doll-days, with covers patterned in gold, served by prostrating geisha whose kimono were woven with violet Fujis, winged dragons and marvelous exotic blossoms.
Daunt pointed to a dish which had just been set before her. "You must try the hasu-no-renkon," he said. "That's cooked lotos-root. It's nearly as good as it looks."
"How do you ever remember the names!"
"Oh, it's quite easy to talk Japanese," he replied recklessly. "There are only fifty syllables in the language, and any way you string them together it means something or other. It doesn't matter whether it's the right thing or not, if you just bow and smile. There are seventeen ways of drawing in your breath which are a lot more important than what you say!"
"What disgraceful nonsense! What is that pink thing?"
"Raw bonito. The refuge of dyspeptics. Voynich, over there, eats nothing else at home, they say. The variegated compound is kuchitori. It's made of sugared chestnuts, leeks and pickled fish. May I compliment you on the way you handle your chopsticks? At my first Japanese dinner I bit one in two. Isn't Baroness Stroloff stunning, by the way!"