Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/324

 THE PAPERS

I

was a longish period—the dense duration of a London winter, cheered, if cheered it could be called, with lurid electric, with fierce "incandescent" flares and glares—when they repeatedly met, at feeding-time, in a small and not quite savoury pothouse a stone's throw from the Strand. They talked always of pot-houses, of feeding-time—by which they meant any hour between one and four of the afternoon; they talked of most things, even of some of the greatest, in a manner that gave, or that they desired to show as giving, in respect to the conditions of their life, the measure of their detachment, their contempt, their general irony. Their general irony, which they tried at the same time to keep gay and to make amusing at least to each other, was their refuge from the want of savour, the want of napkins, the want, too often, of shillings, and of many things besides that they would have liked to have. Almost all they had with any security was their youth, complete, admirable, very nearly invulnerable, or as yet inattackable; for they didn't count their talent, which they had originally taken for granted and had since then lacked freedom of mind, as well indeed as any offensive reason, to reappraise. They were taken up with other questions and other estimates—the remarkable limits, for instance, of their luck, the remarkable smallness of the talent of their friends. They were above all in that phase of youth and in that 312