elding. Our friends, when we
stopped them dropping in by day, began dropping in by night instead, and
one group of friends to whom Thursday night was particularly well
adapted for the purpose gradually turned their dropping in from a chance
into a habit until, before we knew it, we were regularly at home every
Thursday after dinner.

[Illustration: Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell
OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS]

The entertainment, if it can be called by so fine a name, always
retained something of the character of chance with which it began. We
sent out no invitations, we attempted no formality. Nobody was asked to
play at anything or to listen to anything. Nobody was expected to
dress, though anybody who wanted to could--everybody was welcome in the
clothes they wore, whether they came straight from the studio or a
dinner. If eventually I provided sandwiches--in addition to the tobacco
always at hand in the home of the man who smokes and the
whiskey-and-soda without which an Englishman cannot exist through an
evening--it was because I got too hungry not to need something to eat
before the last of the company had said good-night. We did not offer
even the comfort of space. Once the small dining-room that had been
Etty's studio, and the not over-large room that was J.'s, and the
nondescript room that was drawing-room and my workroom combined, were
packed solid, there was no place to overflow into except the short,
narrow entrance hall, and I still grow hot at the thought of what became
of hats and coats if it also was filled. I can never forget the
distressing evening when in the bathroom--which, with the ingenuity of
the designer of flats, had been fitted in at the end of the narrow hall
and was the reason of its shortness--I caught William Penn devouring the
gloves of an artist's wife who I do not believe has forgiven him to this
day; nor the still more distressing occasion when I discovered Bobbie,
William's poor timid successor, curled up on a brand-new bonnet of
feathers and lace.

But it was the very informality, so long as it led to no crimes on the
part of our badly brought-up cats, that attracted the friends who were
as busy and hard-working as ourselves,--this, and the freedom to talk
without being silenced for the music that no talker wants to hear when
he can listen to his own voice, or for the dances that nobody wants to
watch if he can follow his own argument, or for the introductions that
invariably interrupt a