ome
to gloat about Turner or Constable or anybody else who lived at
Hampstead a hundred years ago. I come here to enjoy myself--for
roundabouts, cockles and whelks, steam-organs--which, after all, are the
same thing as Keats or Coleridge. They're Life."

Wherefore I felt determined that I could not and would not go to a
whist-drive at Surbiton, when I could get the real thing in Upper
Street, Islington.

Then Georgie called for me at the office, and we went out to lunch.
Georgie had sold a picture. He had five pounds in his pocket. We went to
Maxim's and had lunch. Georgie insisted on sparkling Moselle, and we had
two bottles, and three rounds of Cointreau triple sec. By that time it
was too late to think of going back to work, so I took Georgie to tea at
a literary club, and we talked. I then discovered in a panic that it was
half-past six. The whist-drive was at eight, and I had yet to dine and
get down to Surbiton. Georgie, by that subtle magnetism which he
possesses, had drawn a bunch of the boys about him, and had induced them
to make a night of it with him; so we went to Simpson's to eat, and I
left them at the table, very merry, and departed to Waterloo. Somewhere,
between lunch and dinner, I had unconsciously decided, you see, that I
would go to Surbiton. I can't remember just when the change in my
attitude took place; but there it was. I went to Surbiton, feeling quite
good and almost in love with Surbiton.

The whist-drive was to be held in the local hall, and when I arrived
cabs and motors were forming a queue. Each cab vomited some dainty
arrangement in lace or black cloth. Everybody was "dressed." (I think I
said that it was Surbiton.) Everybody was on best behaviour. Remembering
the gang at Simpson's, I felt rather a scab, but a glance in the mirror
of the dressing-room reassured me. I recollected some beautiful words of
Mr. Mark Sheridan's, "If I'm not clever, thank God, I'm clean." The
other fellows in the dressing-room were things of beauty. Their
public-school accent, with its vile mispronunciation of the English
tongue, would have carried them into the inner circles of any European
chancellery. I never heard anything so supernally affecting. I have
heard many of our greatest actors and singers, but I have never heard so
much music put into simple words, as, "I say, you fellers!"

Everybody was decent. Everybody, you felt sure, could be trusted to do
the decent thing, to do whatever was "done," and