This book is different. The steel engravers have long since all died
of starvation; and here are photographs only, but there are many
more of them, and (strange innovation!) there are more gentlemen than
ladies. For this preponderance there is a good commercial reason, as
any student of the work will quickly discover, for we are now entering
a sphere of life where the beauty of the sterner sex (if so severe a
word can be applied to such sublimation of everything that is soft and
voluptuous and endearing) is more considered than that of the other.
Beautiful ladies are here in some profusion, but the first place is
for beautiful and guinea-earning gentlemen.

In the old Books of Beauty one could make a choice. There was always
one lady supremely longer-necked, more wistful or more simpering than
the others. But in this new Book of Beauty one turns the pages only to
be more perplexed. The embarrassment of riches is too embarrassing. I
have been through the work a score of times and am still wondering on
whom my affections and admiration are most firmly fixed.

This new Book of Beauty has a very different title from the old ones.
It is called _The Pekingese_, and is the revised edition for 1914.

How to play the part of _Paris_ where all the competitors have some
irresistibility, as all have of either sex! Once I thought that Wee Mo
of Westwood was my heart's chiefest delight, "a flame-red little dog
with black mask and ear-fringes, profuse coat and featherings, flat
wide skull, short flat face, short bowed legs and well-shaped
body." But then I turned back to Broadoak Beetle and on to Broadoak
Cirawanzi, and Young Beetle, and Nanking Fo, and Ta Fo of Greystones,
and Petshé Ah Wei, and Hay Ch'ah of Toddington, and that superb
Sultanic creature, King Rudolph of Ruritania, and Champion Howbury