t the wrong moment, or for the games and
innumerable devices without which intelligent human beings are not
supposed to be able to survive an evening in each other's company. The
idle who play golf all day and bridge all night, who cannot eat in the
short intervals between without music, believe that talk has gone out of
fashion. My experience had been in Rome and Venice, was then in London,
and is now, that men and women who have something to talk about are
always anxious to talk about it, if only the opportunity is given to
them, and the one attraction we offered was just this opportunity for
people who had been doing more or less the same sort of work all day to
meet and talk about it all night--the reason why, despite heat and
discomfort, despite meagre fare and the risk to hats and coats, Thursday
after Thursday crowded our rooms to suffocation as soon as evening came.

[Illustration: Bust by Rodin
W.E. HENLEY]

II

As, in memory, I listen to the endless talk of our Thursday nights, the
leading voice, when not J.'s, is Henley's, which is natural since it was
Henley, followed by his Young Men,--our name for his devoted staff
always in attendance at his office and out of it,--who got so into the
habit of dropping in to see us on Thursday night that we got into the
habit of staying at home to see him. For Thursday was the night when the
_National Observer_, which he was editing at the time, went to press and
Ballantynes, the printers, were not more than five minutes away in
Covent Garden. At about ten his work was over and he and his Young Men
were free to do nothing save talk for the rest of the week if they
chose--and they usually did choose--and Buckingham Street was a handy
place to begin it in. Our rooms were already fairly well packed,
pleasantly smoky, and echoing with the agreeable roar of battle when
they arrived.

I like to remember Henley as I saw him then, especially if my quite
superfluous feeling of responsibility as hostess had brought me on some
equally superfluous mission into the little hall at the moment of his
arrival. As the door opened he would stand there at the threshold, his
tall soft black hat still crowning his massive head, leaning on his
crutch and stick as he waited to take breath after his climb up our
three flights of stone stairs--"Did I really ever climb those stairs at
Buckingham Street?"--he asked me the last time I saw him, some years
later, at Worthing when he was ill and b