At each pair of doors was a living statue of dignity in cloth of gold.

She passed these statues without a sign of fear, but when she saw the room itself, steeped in a supra-genteel calm, full of gowns and hats and everything that you read about in the _Lady's Pictorial,_ and the pennoned mast of a barge crossing the windows at the other end, she stopped suddenly.

And one of the lord mayors of the Grand Babylon, wearing a mayoral chain, who had started out to meet them, stopped also.
"No!" she said.

"I don't feel as if I could eat here.

I really couldn't." "But why ?" "Well," she said, "I couldn't fancy it somehow.