self-conscious young rebels. A good deal of powder was flying about in
the Nineties, and when powder flies, whatever else may come of it, one
thing sure is that nobody can sleep and most people want to talk.

I had not been in London a year before I knew that there the _cafe_ was
not the place to talk in. I have dreary memories of the first efforts J.
and I, fresh from Italy, made to go on leading the easy, free-from-care
life in restaurants and _cafes_ we had led in Rome and Venice. But it
was not to be done. The distances were too great, the weather too
atrocious, the little restaurants too impossible, the big restaurants
too beyond our purse, and the only real _cafe_ was the _Cafe Royal_. At
an earlier date Whistler had drawn his followers to it. In the Nineties
Frederick Sandys was one of its most familiar figures. Even now,
especially on Saturday nights, young men, in long hair and strange hats
and laboriously unconventional clothes, are to be met there, looking a
trifle solemnized by their share in so un-English an entertainment. For
this is the trouble: The _cafe_ is not an English institution and
something in the atmosphere tells you right away that it isn't. It
might, it may still, serve us for an occasion, its mirrors and gilding
and red velvet pleasantly reminiscent, but for night after night it
would not answer at all as the _Nazionale_ had answered in Rome, the
_Orientale_ in Venice.

However, Buckingham Street made a good substitute as an extremely
convenient centre for talk, and its convenience was so well taken
advantage of that, at this distance of time, I am puzzled to see how we
ever got any work done. J. and I have never been given to inhospitality,
and we both liked the talk. But the day of reckoning came when, sitting
down to lunch one morning, we realized that it was the first time we
had eaten that simple meal alone for we could not remember how long.
The lunch for which no preparation is made and at which the company is
uninvited but amusing may be one of the most agreeable of feasts, but we
knew too well that if we went on cutting short our days of work to enjoy
it, we ran the risk of no lunch ever again for ourselves, let alone for
anybody else.

To be interrupted in the evening did not matter so much, though our
evenings were not altogether free of work--nor are J.'s even yet, the
years proving less kind in moulding him to the indolence to which, with
age, I often find myself pleasantly yi