Page:Points of friction.djvu/222

 have Mr. Henry Adams's word for it that, as late as 1862, Englishmen were not expected to smoke in the house. They went out of doors or to the stables. Only a licensed libertine like Monckton Milnes permitted his guests to smoke in their rooms. Half a century later, Mr. Rupert Brooke, watching a designer in the advertising department of a New York store making "Matisse-like illustrations to some notes on summer suitings," was told by the superintendent that the firm gave a "free hand" to its artists, "except for nudes, improprieties, and figures of people smoking." To these last, some customers—even customers of the sex presumably interested in summer suitings—"strongly objected."

The new school of English fiction which centres about the tea-table, and in which, as in the land of the lotus-eaters, it is always afternoon, affords an arena for conversation and an easily 210