any street in
London, but in that obscure mean quarter of London in which they had
built it it appeared unduly enormous. Lifting right up above those
grotesque houses and built in that Greek style that we call Georgian,
there was something Olympian about it. To my host an unfashionable
street could have meant nothing, through all his youth wherever he had
gone had become fashionable the moment he went there; words like the
East End could have had no meaning to him.

Whoever built that house had enormous wealth and cared nothing for
fashion, perhaps despised it. As I stood gazing at the magnificent
upper windows draped with great curtains, indistinct in the evening,
on which huge shadows flickered my host attracted my attention from
the doorway, and so I went in and met for the second time the ex-King
of Eritivaria.

In front of us a stairway of rare marble led upwards, he took me
through a side-door and downstairs and we came to a banqueting-hall of
great magnificence. A long table ran up the middle of it, laid for
quite twenty people, and I noticed the peculiarity that instead of
chairs there were thrones for everyone except me, who was the only
guest and for whom there was an ordinary chair. My host explained to
me when we all sat down that everyone who belonged to that club was by
rights a king.

In fact none was permitted, he told me, to belong to the club until
his claim to a kingdom made out in writing had been examined and
allowed by those whose duty it was. The whim of a populace or the
candidate's own misrule were never considered by the investigators,
nothing counted with them but heredity and lawful descent from kings,
all else was ignored. At that table there were those who had once
reigned themselves, others lawfully claimed descent from kings that
the world had forgotten, the kingdoms claimed by some had even changed
their names. Hatzgurh, the mountain kingdom, is almost regarded as
mythical.

I have seldom seen greater splendour than that long hall provided
below the level of the street. No doubt by day it was a little sombre,
as all basements are, but at night with its great crystal chandeliers,
and the glitter of heirlooms that had gone into exile, it surpassed
the splendour of palaces that have only one king. They had come to
London suddenly most of those kings, or their fathers before them, or
forefathers; some had come away from their kingdoms by night, in a
light sleigh, flogging the horses,