e of his Young Men were not there before me or did not
come in before I left. In London, on his journeys to and fro, they
surrounded him as a bodyguard. If on those old Thursday nights, his was
the loudest voice, theirs played up to it untiringly. There were no half
measures about them. As warriors in the cause of art and literature,
they reserved nothing from their devotion to their leader, they
exhausted every possibility of that form of flattery usually considered
the greatest. They fought Henley's battles with hardly less valour,
hardly milder roaring. On Thursday, they had been working with him all
day and all evening, they probably had lunched together, and dined
together, and yet so far from showing any desire to separate on their
arrival in our rooms, they immediately grouped themselves again round
Henley.

It was curious, anyway, how strong the tendency was with all the company
to break up into groups. Work was the common bond, but there was also a
special bond in each different kind of work. On my round as hostess I
was sure to find the writers in one corner, the artists in another, the
architects in a third--though to this day it is a question with me why
we should have had enough architects to make a group and, more puzzling,
why, having them, they should have been so unpopular, unless it was
because of their air of prosperity and respectability, always as correct
in appearance as if there was a possible client at the door. I can still
recall the triumphant glee, out of all proportion to the cause, of one
of Henley's Young Men the Thursday night he came to tell me that all the
architects were safe out of the way in the studio, and "I have shut both
doors," he added, "and now that we are rid of them we can talk." As if
any of Henley's Young Men under any circumstances ever did anything
else.

Some of Henley's staff, if I remember, never came to us, others came
only occasionally, but a few failed us as rarely as Henley himself. The
Thursday night was the exception that did not see Charles Whibley at
Henley's right hand even as he was in the pages of the _National
Observer_, not merely ready for the fight but provoking it, insisting
upon it, forcing it, boisterous in battle, looking like an
undergraduate, talking like a pastmaster of the art of invective, with a
little stammer that gave point to his lightest commonplace. Rarely
lagging very far behind came Marriott Watson, young, tall, blonde,
good-looking--a