James's Park. Mrs. Strickland asked
me for my address, and a few days later I received an
invitation to luncheon.
My engagements were few, and I was glad to accept. When I
arrived, a little late, because in my fear of being too early
I had walked three times round the cathedral, I found the
party already complete. Miss Waterford was there and Mrs. Jay,
Richard Twining and George Road. We were all writers.
It was a fine day, early in spring, and we were in a good humour.
We talked about a hundred things. Miss Waterford,
torn between the aestheticism of her early youth, when she
used to go to parties in sage green, holding a daffodil, and
the flippancy of her maturer years, which tended to high heels
and Paris frocks, wore a new hat. It put her in high spirits.
I had never heard her more malicious about our common friends.
Mrs. Jay, aware that impropriety is the soul of wit, made
observations in tones hardly above a whisper that might well
have tinged the snowy tablecloth with a rosy hue.
Richard Twining bubbled over with quaint absurdities, and
George Road, conscious that he need not exhibit a brilliancy which
was almost a by-word, opened his mouth only to put food into it.
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