re in dress suits or tweeds as they
chose, the women in evening or tailor gowns according to their
convenience. I have an impression that more people came than were
expected and that it was all the waiters could do to serve them. I know
I was much more concerned with my discomfort to find that Harland and
Beardsley, for the first time in my experience, had forgotten how to
talk. Everybody else was talking. I can still see the animated faces and
hear the animated voices of Mrs. Harland and John Oliver Hobbes and
Menie Muriel Dowie and Kenneth Grahame and George Moore and John Lane
and Max Beerbohm, and all the brand-new writers prepared to shock, or to
"uplift," or to pull down old altars and set up new ones, or any other
of the fine things that were to make the _Yellow Book_ a force and
famous. But also I can still feel the heavy, unnatural silence of the
two editors from which I was the chief sufferer, to me having fallen
the honour of sitting in the centre of the high table between them. J.
was away and, in his absence, I was distinguished by this mark of
Beardsley's appreciation and Harland's friendliness. I was greatly
flattered, but less entertained. They were both as nervous as debutantes
at a first party. Shrinking from the shadow cast before by their coming
speeches, neither of them had as much as a word to throw me. Nor could
they concentrate their distracted thoughts upon the _menu_--plate after
plate was taken away untouched, while I kept on emptying mine in
self-defence, to pass the time, wondering if, in my role of the _Pall
Mall's_ "greedy Autolycus," my friends would now convict me of the sin
of public eating as well as what they had been pleased to pretend was my
habit of "private eating," for not otherwise, they would assure me,
could they account for the unfailing flamboyancy of my weekly article on
cookery. Seated between the two men, in their hours of ease when they
were not editors, my trouble would have been to listen to both at the
same moment and to get a word in edgewise. However, when the speeches
were over the strain was relaxed. The evening ended in the accustomed
floods of talk;--on the way from the Hotel d'Italie; at the Bodley
Head, John Lane's new premises in the Albany to which he took us all
that we might see the place from which the _Yellow Book_ was to be
published; round a little table with a red-and-white checked cover in
the basement of the Monico, the company now reduced to Harland