1.

IT would be impossible, I feel, to actually be as decadent as Lambert looked. I split the infinitive deliberately, being in the first place no non-split diehard (oh, the admirable Mr. Fowler!), and desiring secondly to emphasise what was in fact the dominant and immediate consideration which Lambert evoked. I have met many men with wobbly walks, but I have never met a walk more wobbly than that of Lambert Orme. It was more than sinuous, it did more than undulate: it rippled. At each step a wave was started which passed upwards through his body, convexing his buttocks, concaving the small of his back, convexing again his slightly rounded shoulders, and working itself out in a backward swaying of the neck and head. This final movement passed off more rapidly than the initial undulations, with the resulting impression of a face upturned generally, but bowing at rhythmic intervals, as if a tired royalty or a camel slouching heavily along the road to Isfahan. At each inclination the lock of red-gold hair which shrouded the lowness of his brow would flop, and rise again, and then again would flop. He was a tall young man and he would bend his right knee laterally, his right foot resting upon an inward-pointing toe. He had retreating shoulders, a retreating forehead, a retreating waist. The face itself was a curved face, a boneless face, a rather pink face, fleshy about the chin. His eyelashes were fair and fluttering; his lips were full. When he giggled, which he did with nervous frequency, his underlip would come to rest below his upper teeth. He held his cigarette between the index and the middle fingers, keeping them outstretched together with the gesture of a male impersonator puffing at a cigar. His hands, rather damp on their inner side, gave the impression on their outer side of being double-jointed. He dressed simply, wearing an opal pin, and a velours hat tilted angularly. He had a peculiar way of speaking: his sentences came in little splashing pounces; and then from time to time he would hang on to a word as if to steady himself: he would say “Simplytooshattering FOR words,” the phrase being a slither with a wild clutch at the banister of “for.” He was very shy.

I had not met nor noticed Lambert Orme during my first term at Oxford, but in the Easter vacation he came out to Madrid with a letter of introduction to my people. They asked him to luncheon. I eyed him with sullen disapproval. He stood for none of the things which I had learnt at Wellington. Clearly he was not my sort. He had the impudence to announce that he had resolved to devote himself to art, music and literature. “Before I am twenty-one,” he said, “I shall have painted a good picture, written a novel, and composed a waltz.” He pronounced it valse. My gorge rose within me. I refused during the whole course of luncheon to speak to Lambert Orme. And yet behind my indignation vibrated a little fibre of curiosity. Or was it more than curiosity? I hope that it was something more. Subsequently I was reproved by my mother for my behaviour. She said in the first place that I should have better manners. In the second place she said that I was little more than a Philistine. And in the third place she said that she was sure that poor boy wasn’t very strong.

It interests me to recapture my own frame of mind at the time of this my first meeting with Lambert Orme. It amuses me to look back upon the block of intervening years in which I also aped æstheticism, toyed with the theory that I also could become an intellectual. Have I returned after all these garish wanderings to the mood which descended upon me that afternoon in the dark and damask dining-room at Madrid? No, I have not returned. It is true that some faint and tattered fibres of heartiness do still mingle with my ageing nerves. I have my Kipling side. But I can at least admit to-day that Orme was in several ways a serious person. And I have been told by people whose opinion I would not dare to disregard that such was indeed the case.

2.

The immediate result of my mother’s lecture was that I promised to take the fellow for a ride. At the back of my mind (but not I fear so very far at the back) was a desire to humiliate Lambert, a quite caddish desire on my part to show off. I sent the horses to the entrance of the Casa de Campo and drove down there with Lambert in a cab. He mounted his horse and remained there with surprising firmness, and, moreover, with an elegance which shamed the clumsiness of my own arrant style. His languid manner dropped from him; if his back curved slightly it was but with a hellenic curve, the forward-seat of some Panathenaic rider. I was at pains to readjust my conception of him to this altered angle. We rode out under the avenues to where the foot-hills look back to the façade of the palace chalk-white against the smoke above the town: in front, the ramparts of the Guadarrama were jagged with pinnacles of snow. The larks rose from clumps of broom and lavender: a thousand larks above us: a shrill overtone under the crisp spring sky; and from west to east a flock of April clouds trailed rapidly, pushing in front of them patches of scudding shade. The feeling of that afternoon is now upon me: I see no reason to become sentimental about it: even in our most intimate period Lambert Orme possessed for me no emotional significance: yet I recognise that on that afternoon the sap began to mount within me. That, and the summer evening in Doctor Pollock’s garden, are my first two dates.

Not that Lambert said very much. I feel indeed that he was actually unconscious of my existence. He was thinking probably of Albert Samain and of Henri de Régnier, of how pleasant it was, that spring day, among the uplands of Castille. I said: “Over there—you may see it if the sun strikes—is the Escorial.” He said, “Yes, I see.” I said, “And Aranjuez is over there,” pointing vaguely towards Toledo. He turned his head in the direction indicated. “And Segovia?” he asked. I was not very certain about Segovia, but I nodded northwards. “La Granja,” I added, “is quite close to it—really only a few miles.” We turned our horses, and the wind and sun were behind us. The smoke of the town billowed into sharp layers, an upward layer of white smoke hanging against a sweep of grey smoke, in its turn backed by a crinkled curtain of black. The sun and snow-wind behind us lit and darkened this grisaille. “Oh!” I exclaimed, “What an El Greco sky!” It was an opening. He could have taken it had he wished. He merely said, “Does the King live in the palace? Is he there now?” I answered that he was.

We crossed the Manzanares, where there were women washing white sheets. They beat them against the boulders. The palace above us was turning pink against the sunset. Lambert asked me to tea. I gave my horse to the groom and walked round with him to the rooms he had taken near the Opera House. It was some sort of pension, and he had characteristically caused the walls to be distempered with a light buff wash, and had arranged the room with red silk, and walnut furniture, and two large gilt candelabra from a church. He was very rich. Upon his writing-table lay a ruled sheet of music-manuscript, and upon another table some paint-brushes and tubes of water-colour. He had painted a little picture of an infanta in what I now realise to have been the manner of Brabazon. It was rather good. There were a great many cushions and several French books. He became artificial again when he entered his rooms and his voice slithered and he ordered tea in highly irritating French. There was a sheet of vellum lying near the fireplace on which, in an upright scribble, Lambert had written: “Mon âme est une infante …” and then again “Mon âme est …” and then, very calligraphically, “en robe de parade.” It was cold in his room and he lit the logs in the fire. He then threw incense on it, and a puff of scented smoke billowed beyond the grate. My antagonism returned to me.

Lambert thereafter became very foolish about the tea. He did hostess: his gestures were delicate: there was a tea-cloth which was obviously his own. I lit my pipe and said I must be going. He picked up a book at random: I really believe it was at random. He said, “Would you like to take this?” I said I would. It was the Jardin de Bérénice. I suppose that, really, is what dates the occasion.

3.

When I returned to Oxford I visited Lambert in his rooms at Magdalen, drawn by an attraction which I should have hesitated to admit. They were in the new buildings and looked out upon the deer park: as one sipped one’s Malaga, one could hear the stags barking amorously underneath the trees. His sitting-room was exquisitely decorated. When I think of that room I am again convinced that there was something cabotin about Lambert Orme: people at the age of twenty should not have rooms like that. He had painted it a shiny black: there were grey sofas with petunia cushions: there was a Coromandel cabinet with blue china on the top and some hard-stone stuff inside. It was not in the least like the room of an undergraduate: it made me at first rather ashamed of my own room with its extracts from “the hundred best pictures,” its photograph of the charioteer of Delphi, and its kettle-holder with the Balliol arms: it made me, in the end, like my own room very much indeed. And yet inevitably I was entranced by that little gîte (I use the correct word) at Magdalen: by the firelight flickering upon the yellow books: by the Manet reproductions, by the Sobranye cigarettes in their china box. Lambert possessed even in those days a collection of curious literature, and I would sit there after dinner reading Justine, or the novels of M. Achille d’Essebac, or even Under the Hill. All this, I feel sure, was admirable training. My early oats I find were singularly tame. But they were oats none the less. Lambert at the time was writing his novel Désiré de St. Aldegonde. He would read me passages which I failed entirely to understand. They were in the style, curiously enough, of M. Maeterlinck: a style which, in English, tastes like bananas and cream. The book was published some time in 1910 by the Bodley Head. It attracted no attention whatever. And when Lambert, under the influence of M. Guillaume Apollinaire, came to adopt his second manner, he bought up the remaining copies of Désiré and burnt them on the rocks at Polperro.

It was all very pleasant and seductive my dropping down like that to Magdalen; but it became a little awkward when Lambert, in his velours hat, would climb the hill to visit me at Balliol. In any case, I never learnt to cope with Balliol until after I had left it: my real Oxford friends were only made when I met them again in after life. The effect of Balliol upon my development was salutary and overpowering. But it didn’t work at the time. On looking back at Balliol I realise that during those three years I was wholly abominable. That Balliol should have shared this opinion indicates its admirable sense. But although I had at that time but little conception of what Balliol was thinking, yet I realised quite definitely that they would not, that they did not, approve of Lambert at all. I cannot therefore say that I relished his visits. My sitting-room with its grained wood walls looked somewhat squalid at his entry: the rep sofa, the brass reading lamp with its torn red shade, that other light hanging naked but for a glass reflector: the inadequate books: Stubbs’ charters, Smith’s classical dictionary, Liddell and Scott—none of that crystalline glitter of those rooms at Magdalen. My scout would burst in with his cap on, and bang the chipped plates beside the fire: the tin covers rattled. The kettle also rattled internally when one poured it out. There was always a little coal inside the kettle. The spout of the tea-pot spouted diagonally owing to a slight abrasion. The cloth was stained and bore in place of embroidery my name in marking ink. There were buttered buns and anchovy toast. Lambert ate them gingerly.

“I wish,” I said to him, being incensed by the refinement of his attitude, “that you wouldn’t wear a hat.”

“But if I didn’t,” he giggled, “I might be taken for an undergraduate.”

“But at least not that hat, and at least not at that angle.”

“Now don’t be tahsome.”

There were moments when I hated Lambert. It is a mystery to me how Magdalen tolerated him for so long. The end came, as was inevitable, after a bump supper. I never knew what they did to Lambert: I know only that he escaped in his Daimler never to return. I missed him for a bit, and then I was glad of his departure. I realised that I had been tarred a little by his brush. I mentioned the matter, rather tentatively, to Sligger Urquhart. He seemed to have no particular feeling for Lambert, either for or against: he pouted for a moment, and then said that he had found him “absurdly childish.” I do not suppose that that remark was intended to be very penetrating: I know only that it penetrated me like a lance. The angle from which I had begun to regard Lambert Orme was shifted suddenly: it ceased to be an ascending angle and became in the space of a few seconds a descending angle: I had begun, in a way, to look up to Lambert: I now, quite suddenly and in every way, found myself looking down. A few days later Sligger, most subtle of dons, presented me with a copy of Marius the Epicurean. I found it on my table when I came back from the river: there was a note inside saying, “I think you had better read this”: and on the fly-leaf he had written “H.N. from F.F.U.” By this homœopathic treatment I was quickly cured. And yet this false start, if it was a false start, left me troubled and uncertain. I remained uncertain for several months.

4.

As so often in such cases, my ensuing reaction against the eighteen-nineties took the form of a virulent loathing which I have never since been able to shake off. I am assured by reliable people that it was a serious movement of revolt and liberation: I can see for myself that the Yellow Book group were all extremely kind and made jokes which, at the time, were found amusing: I am prepared to respect, but I cannot like them. The whole business is too reminiscent of those puzzled and uncertain months at Oxford. It takes me straight back to that room at Magdalen: “Now listen to this, it’s too too wonderful: it’s really toomuchfun.” I have a sense of many little wheels revolving brightly but devoid of cogs. I have a sense predominantly of the early Lambert Orme.

I did not see him again for some five years. He went round the world and sent me a postcard from Yokohama. He was immensely impressed by the beauty of American cities, and it was from them, I think, that he first learnt to see life as a system of correlated planes. It was several years, however, before his very real and original talent for association was able finally to cast the slough of symbolism. When I next met him he was still intensively concerned with the relation between things and himself: it was only in his final period that he became predominantly interested in the relation of things towards each other. His talent, which though singularly receptive was not very muscular, had failed to extract any interesting synthesis from the confrontation of the universe with his own twitching heart: he had tried, and he had failed, to interpret conscious cognition by a single simple emotion. But in his later period he did in fact succeed in conveying an original analysis, implicit rather than expressed, of the diversity and interrelation of external phenomena: he was able to suggest a mood of sub-conscious perplexity sensitive to unapparent affinities. The conception of life as a repetition of self-contained and finite entities can be integrated only by the pressure of a compelling imagination: Lambert’s imagination though mobile was not compelling: I suspect indeed that less power is required to disintegrate such entities, to suggest a world of atoms fortuitously whirling into certain shapes, to indicate a tremendous unknown, quivering below the crust of our convention. His later poetry succeeded because of its reference to this unapparent reality. I am now assured that some of his later poems were very respectable.

Meanwhile, however, Lambert Orme continued to represent for me something “absurdly childish”; his attitude of mind struck me as undeveloped and out of date. He was obsessed by false claims. He was no longer, not in any sense, a guide: he was just someone who rather uninterestingly had wandered off. The circumstances of our meeting, five years after he had escaped from Magdalen, confirmed me in this opinion. It made me very angry with Lambert Orme, and when I think of it to-day I become angry again.

He came to Constantinople on his way back from Egypt. He left a note saying that he had “descended” at the Pent Palace and would like to see me. I was interested to hear from him again, and told him to come to the Embassy at 9.30 the next morning and I would take him sailing up the Bosphorus. I had a sailing boat in those days, a perilous little affair, which I called the Elkovan. I had bought it in a moment of optimism, imagining that I would sail daily out into the Marmora, and that on Sundays I would go for longer expeditions to Ismid and Eregli and the Gulf of Cyzikos. But in practice the thing became a bore. The current which streamed out from the Black Sea permitted no such liberty of movement. I ascertained that if I followed the current I should be unable, when the wind fell at sunset, to return. So I would tack painfully against the stream, gaining but a mile or so in as many hours, and then I would swing round and float back rapidly while the minarets showed their black pencils against the setting sun. This pastime became monotonous; it was only on those rare occasions when the south wind blew strongly that one derived the impression of sailing at all. The Sunday on which I had invited Lambert Orme to accompany me was one of these occasions. A spring day opened before me, enlivened by warm gusts of the Bithynian wind—the wind which the Byzantines to this day call vóτoς: I ordered a large and excellent luncheon; with luck we should get out beyond Kavak and into the Black Sea. We might bathe even. I looked forward to my day with pleasure.

I waited for Lambert Orme. At 10.0 a man brought me a note in his neat hellenic writing. “To-day is too wonderful,” he wrote, “it is the most wonderful day that ever happened: it would be too much for me: let us keep to-day as something marvellous that did not occur.” I dashed furiously round to his hotel, but he had already left with his courier to visit the churches. I scribbled “Silly ass” on my card and left it for him. I then sailed up the Bosphorus indignant and alone. When I returned my servant met me with a grin: my sitting-room was banked with Madonna lilies. “C’est un Monsieur,” he said, “qui vous a apporté tout ça.” “Quel Monsieur?” “Un Monsieur qui porte le chapeau de travers.”

5.

I thereafter and for many years dismissed Lambert from my mind. As a person he really did not seem worth the bother, as an intellect he was absurdly childish—he represented the rotted rose-leaves of the Yellow Book. I came to be more and more ashamed of the period when I also had dabbled in æstheticism, a feeling of nausea came over me when I thought of the Malaga and cigarettes in that expensive room at Magdalen. Lambert represented a lapse.

I do not to-day regard him as a lapse. He was inconvenient doubtless and did me external harm. But he represented my first contact with the literary mind. I see now that my untutored self required some such stimulant: that it should have been Grand Marnier and not some decent brandy is immaterial: he provided an impetus at the very moment when the wheels hesitated to revolve. Balliol was all very well, and Sligger Urquhart at least understood and assisted, but my palate was, in fact, too insensitive for so matured a vintage. I therefore look on Lambert, in retrospect, as a short cut. What I failed to realise was the possibility that Lambert also might grow up. His later method, that obtuse angle from which he came to regard life, would, had I realised it, have been an even shorter cut and to more interesting objectives. But once I had discarded him, I did so with no reservations. I thought that any resumption of his influence would entail a retrogression: I failed in my stupidity to see that he had once again sprung ahead of me: and while I dabbled in Bakst and Flecker, Lambert had already reached the van.

As I write of this period, its atmosphere of diffident uncertainty descends upon me. I wish to convey some sharp outline of Lambert Orme, but it all results in a fuzz of words. I am still quite unaware whether I regard Lambert as ridiculous, as tragic, or as something legendary. A section of me is prepared to take him seriously, to read with admiration those of his poems which I am told are good. Another, and less reputable section, wishes to deride Lambert, to hold him up to obloquy. And yet another section feels rather soppy about him, simply because he died in the war. Which is, of course, absurd. Physically he is definite enough. I can see him again, as at our next meeting, sinuously descending the steps of the National Gallery. A day in late October with the cement around the fountains glistening from the damp of fog. A stream of traffic past Morley’s Hotel, another stream past the shop of Mr. Dent, a river of traffic down Whitehall. And in the centre, that ungainly polygon, doves and urchins and orange-peel, and a sense of uncloistered quiet. It was the autumn of 1913: he had abandoned his velours, which since our Oxford days had become the head-gear of the proletariate: he wore instead a black Borsalino which he had purchased while studying baroque at Ancona. But still he wilted: he wilted when I accosted him: he entered the Café Royal with a peculiarly self-conscious undulation which made me shy.

He still employed the old vocabulary (he said that I had been “very tahsome” at Constantinople), but his whole angle had shifted. The former avid subjectivity was leaving him, he was far less excited: his interest in life was no less passionate but had come under some form of control: predominantly he was interested in the sort of things that had never interested him before. He was in love with the wife of the Rumanian Military Attaché at Brussels. He talked about it quite simply as if he had always been a sensualist. He had decided to live in Paris, and had, in fact, already bought a house at Neuilly: he would write and collect pictures, and see to his own education: once a month he would go to Brussels for love and inspiration. He had evolved a not uninteresting theory of the necessity of living in a mechanical framework: at Neuilly the externals of his life were to be organised according to the strictest time-table: every day was in all material respects to be identical with every other day: this rhythmic repetition would in the end produce a background of symmetry against which all new experience would acquire a more intense significance, would assume the proportions of a physical displacement. The eighteen-nineties and the nineteen hundreds (he spoke of them in a detached and objective manner) had failed because they dissipated their emotions: they were unable either to concentrate or to select. Their system of life was garish and dispersed: his own system, out at Neuilly, would be a monochrome and concentric: he would limit his emotions: he would achieve a pattern rather than an arabesque. I suggested that so artificial a system of detachment might in itself be limiting. He was unexpectedly sensible about it all: he said that he realised that his system could only be an experiment, that even if successful it might be suitable only for himself. But he was quite determined. And ten months later, in July of 1914, he published Lay Figures, which, with his book of war poems, places him in a perfectly definite position. There is something very mean in me which resents this position. I am not myself very convinced by it. But it is recognised by people whose judgment I am honestly quite unable to ignore.

6.

At moments, in the roar and rattle of the early stages of the war, I would reflect a little grimly on the collapse of Lambert’s symmetry, on those cobweb time-tables swept aside unnoticed in the onrush of the maddened beast. He sent me a copy of Lay Figures which reached me in the early days of August and which remained unopened for many years. Until the spring of 1916 he stayed at Paris, justifying his existence by a little hospital-work, writing those poems which figure as “mes hôpitaux” in his war volume. And then in March he crossed over to England and joined the army. He came to see me before he left for France. He did not look as odd in his uniform as I had expected: he talked voraciously about the new movements in French literature and in a way which I failed entirely to understand: of his training down at Salisbury he said little, giggling feebly when I asked him about it, telling me “not to be morbid” when I pressed for details. I could see no signs of any alteration in his physique: a little fatter in the face, perhaps, a little more fleshy round the jaw; but he still wilted, and his walk was as self-conscious as ever. I asked him if he was afraid of Flanders, whether the prospect of the trenches alarmed him as much as it alarmed me. He said that he dreaded the rats, and was afraid of mines. “You see,” he said, “it is the evitable or the wholly unexpected that is horrible. The rest is largely mechanical. It becomes a question of masochism. I certainly shall not mind the rest.” I thought at the time he was being optimistic, but I have since met a man in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company who was with Lambert both in France and Mesopotamia. “Oh, no,” this man said to me, “he was a quiet sort of fellow, Orme. And he had a violent temper. But he was rather a good regimental officer: he put up a good show, I remember, at Sheikh Sa’ad. A very good show. We liked him on the whole.”

Sheikh Sa’ad and Magdalen, that Coromandel cabinet, those bleached and ochre flats—Lambert himself would have savoured these contrasts: it was the sort of thing by which his rather dulled sense of humour would have been aroused. Was it aroused, I wondered, as he lay in the hospital ship at Basrah dying of dysentery? I like to think that it may perhaps have been aroused. He had dignity and courage: I expect he giggled slightly when they told him that he was unlikely to survive.

I heard of his death as I was running, late from luncheon, down the Duke of York’s steps. I met a man coming up the steps who had been at Oxford with us. “You have heard,” he said, “that Orme has died in Mesopotamia?” I walked on towards the Foreign Office feeling very unheroic, very small. I had no sense, at the moment, of wastage—that sorrow which oppresses us to-day when we think back upon the war. I had no sense of pity even, feeling, as I have said, that so startling an incongruity would have illumined Lambert’s courage with a spasm of amusement. I merely felt exhausted by this further appeal to the emotions: a sense of blank despair that such announcements should have ceased to evoke any creditable emotional response: a sense of the injustice of my sheltered lot: a sense of numbed dissatisfaction: a revolting sense of relief that it hadn’t been me.

7.

In the summer of 1925 I went to a party in Bloomsbury. I went with much diffidence, alarmed at entering the Areopagus of British culture. They treated me with distant but not unfriendly courtesy. The fact that, through no fault of my own, I was in evening dress increased the gulf between us. I sidled to the back of the room, hoping to remain unobserved. There was a curious picture on the wall which I studied attentively, trying to extract some meaning from its doubtless significant contours. My host came up to me. “What,” I asked, “is that supposed to represent?” Had I been less unstrung I should not, of course, have asked that question. My host winced slightly and moved away. I turned towards the book-shelves, searching in vain for the friendly bindings of one of mine own books. They were all talking about a sculptor called Brancousi. I pulled out a copy of Hugh Faussett’s Tennyson and began to read. An untidy man came up to me and glanced over my shoulder. He had eyes of great kindness and penetration, and he adopted towards me a manner which suggested that I either had said, or was about to say, something extremely interesting. I asked him whether he had read the book and he answered that he had, and that he felt it was so far more intelligent than the other one that had been published simultaneously. I agreed that it was, it was. He then moved away, and I put the book back tidily in its place. On the shelf above it were some volumes of poetry, and among them Lambert Orme’s Lay Figures which I had never read. I opened it with suddenly awakened interest, and began to turn the pages. My eye was arrested by a heading: “Constantinople: April 1912.” I sat down on the floor at that, and began to read. “Thera” I read:

It went on like this through several stanzas, and conveyed in its final effect a not unconvincing picture of the poet sailing somewhat absent-mindedly up the Bosphorus in a little white boat, accompanied, as he so often repeated, by a man of obtuse sensibilities. I was a little wounded by this posthumous revelation, and put the book down for a moment while I thought. After all, I thought, Lambert didn’t come. If he had come he mightn’t have found me in the least obtuse. I should never have said “That is Bebek.” I should have waited till he asked. And surely, coming back at sunset, and I so silent—surely if he had come, the poem would have been a little less personal. My host was searching in the book-case behind me, and the rest of the room were in suspense about something, evidently waiting for him to illustrate his discourse. “I know,” he said, “it’s here somewhere—I was only reading it last night. They want to do a new edition of both books together—both Lay Figures and the War Poems.” I held the book up to him and he took it from me, a little curtly perhaps, anxious to regain his seat and to continue the discussion. “You see,” he continued, “there is no doubt that Orme was a real pioneer in his way. Of course his stuff was crude enough and he had little sense of balance. But take this, for instance——” He began to turn the pages. “Yes. Here it is. Now this is written in 1912. It describes him sailing up the river at Constantinople with some local bore: there’s really something in it. There really is.” At this he adjusted the light behind him, jerked himself back into his cushion, and began. “Thera,” he began,

He read the whole poem, and when it was finished they made him read it again. They then discussed the thing with appreciation, but with that avoidance of superlatives which so distinguishes their culture. The untidy man leant forward and knocked his pipe against the grate. “Yes, there is no doubt,” he said, “that Orme, had he lived, would have been important. It is a pity in a way. He must have been an interesting man. Did you ever meet him?” He was addressing my host: he was not addressing me.

“No,” my host answered; “he lived in Paris I believe. I’ve never met anyone who knew him.”

The lady, whom, from a distance, I had so much admired, was sitting in the chair in front of me. She turned round and, for the first time, spoke to me. “Mr. Nicholls,” she said, “would you mind opening one of the windows? It is getting hot in here.”

I did as I was told.