st assuredly would have been
a musician or a writer. Added to all this, was the abnormal notice
he attracted almost at once, the diligence with which he was
imitated and parodied and the rapidity with which a Beardsley type
leaped into fashion.

Of course Beardsley enjoyed it. What youth of his age would not have
enjoyed the excitement of such a success? It would have been morbid at
his age not to enjoy it. He never seemed to me more simply himself than
when he was relating his adventures and laughing at them with all the
fresh, gay laughter of the boy--the wonderful boy--he was. Arthur Symons
wrote of him, I have forgotten where, that he admired himself
enormously. I should say that he was amused by himself enormously and
was quite ready to pose and to bewilder for the sake of the amusement
it brought him. He was never spoiled nor misled by either his fame or
his notoriety.

It was so Beardsley's habit to consult J. that he would have asked
advice, if Harland had not, for _The Yellow Book_ which went through
several stages of its preliminary planning in the old Buckingham Street
chambers. Among the vivid memories of our Thursday nights one is of
Harland taking J. apart for long, intimate discussions in a corner of
the studio, and another of Beardsley taking him off for confidences as
intimate and long, and my impression in looking back, though I may be
mistaken, is that each had his personal little scheme for a journal of
his own before he decided to share it with the other. It was
characteristic of the friendliness of both that they should have
insisted upon J. figuring in the first number. As vivid in my memory is
the warm spring morning when Beardsley, his face beaming with joy,
called to give me an early copy of this first number, with a little
inscription from him on the fly-leaf--I have just taken down the volume
from the near book shelf--"To Mrs. Pennell from Aubrey Beardsley" I
read, as commonplace an inscription as ever artist or author wrote, but,
reading it, I see as if it were yesterday the sunlit Buckingham Street
room where I used to work, William Penn curled up on my desk, and,
coming in the door, the radiant youth with the gay-covered book in his
hands.

And there followed the dinner--the amazing dinner as unlike the usual
formal dinner of inauguration as could be. It was given in an upper room
of the Hotel d'Italie in Old Compton Street and was as free of ceremony
as our Thursday nights. The men we