to ours.

I cannot imagine a Thursday night without Rosamund
Marriott-Watson,--Graham R. Tomson as she was then,--beautiful,
reminiscent of Rossetti in her tall, willowy slimness, with her long
neck like a column and her great halo of black hair and her big brown
eyes, appealing, confinding, beseeching. Fashion as she, the poetess,
extolled it week by week in the _National Observer_, became a poem with
a stately measure in frocks and hats, a flowing rhythm in every frill
and furbelow. I lost sight of her later, for reasons neither here nor
there, but it pleases me to know that not many months before her death
she looked back to those years as her happiest when weekly, almost
daily, she was going up and down the Buckingham Street stairs which her
ghost, she said, must haunt until they go the way of too many old stairs
leading up to old London chambers. Violet Hunt was almost as faithful.
And both contributed, as I did, a weekly column--mine that amazing
article on cookery--to the _Pall Mall's_ daily _Wares of Autolycus_,
daily written by women and I daresay believed by us to be the most
entertaining array of unconsidered trifles that any Autolycus had ever
offered to any eager world. Graham Tomson was even moved to commemorate
our collaboration in verse the inspiration of which is not far to seek,
but of which all I remember now is the beginning:

O, there's Mrs. Meynell and Mrs. Pennell,
There's Violet Hunt and me!

for Mrs. Meynell contributed a fourth column, though she never
contributed her presence to Buckingham Street.

Once or twice, George Moore hovered from group to group, his childlike
eyes of wonder protruding, wide open, and his ears open too, no doubt,
for, if I can judge from his several books of reminiscences, his ears
have rarely been closed to talk going on about him. After reading the
Irish series I should suspect him not only of well-opened ears but of an
inexhaustible supply of cuffs safely stored up his sleeves. Bernard Shaw
honoured us occasionally, but I have learned that, bent as he is upon
talking about himself, whatever he has to say, he grows more fastidious
when others talk about him and say what they have to. Now and then,
Henry Norman, journalist, his title and seat in Parliament yet to come,
dropped in. Now and then Miss Preston and Miss Dodge came, both in
London to finish in the British Museum the studies begun in Rome. Rarely
a week passed that James G. Legge was not with