‘But what are these quaint figures?’ I asked, pointing to certain drawings of an obese Japanese figure, grinning with lazy good-humour above several of the cabinets.

‘Hotei, the fat god of enjoyment.’

‘A Japanese god?’ I asked.

’Yes, nothing artistic is quite right now unless it has a savour of blue mould or Japan.  Wonderful people, the Japanese, to have discovered the Jolly Hotei.  And here is Hotei’s wife, the goddess-queen Yoka herself—­the real masquerader behind that mystic veil which has so enveloped and bemuddled the mind of poor Wilderspin.  She is to figure in the first number of The Caricaturist.’

He pointed to an object I had only partially observed:  a broad-faced burly woman, of about forty-five years of age, in an eccentric dress of Japanese silks, standing on the model-throne between two lay figures.  ‘Good heavens!’ I exclaimed, ‘why, she’s alive.’

‘An’ kickin’, sir,’ said a voice that was at once strident and unctuous.  Owing to the almond shape of her sparkling black eyes and the flatness of her nose, the bridge of which had been broken (most likely in childhood), she looked absurdly like a Japanese woman, save that upon her quaintly-cut mouth, curving slightly upwards horse-shoe fashion, there was that twitter of humorous alertness which is perhaps rarely seen in perfection except among the lower orders, Celtic or Saxon, of London.  Her build was that of a Dutch fisher-woman.  The set of her head on her muscular neck showed her to be a woman of immense strength.  But still more was her great physical power indicated by her hands, the fingers of which seemed to have a grip like that of an eagle’s claws.

I then perceived upon an easel a large drawing.  ’I have not seen Wilderspin’s “Faith and Love,"’ I said; ’but this, I see, must be a caricature of it.’

In it the woman figured as Isis, grinning beneath a veil held over her head by two fantastically-dressed figures—­one having the face of Darwin, the other the face of Wilderspin.

‘Allow me,’ said Cyril, ’to introduce you to the Goddess Yoka, the true Isis or goddess of bohemianism and universal joke, who, when she had the chance of I making a rational and common-sense universe, preferred amusing herself with flamingoes, dromedaries, ring-taile monkeys, and men.’

‘Pardon me,’ I said; ‘I merely called to see you.  Good afternoon.’

‘Allow me,’ said he, turning to the woman, ’to introduce to your celestial majesty Mr. Henry Aylwin, a kinsman of mine, whose possessions in Little Egypt are as brilliant (judging from the colours of his royal waggon) as are his possessions in Philistia.’

The woman made me a curtsey of much gravity.  ’And allow me to introduce you,’ he said, turning to me, ’to the real original Natura Mystica,—­she who for ages upon ages has been trying by her funny goings-on to teach us that “the Principium hylarchicum of the cosmos” (to use the simple phraseology of a great spiritualistic painter) is the benign principle of joke.’