Beardsley was beginning to feel his feet. His circle amongst artists and art-lovers was rapidly increasing. Suddenly a legacy to the brother and sister from their Aunt in Brighton, with whom they had lived after their own family came to London, decided the young fellow and his sister to set up house for themselves and to flit from the parental roof. About the end of the year, or the New Year of 1894, they bought their little home--a house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street. [Illustration: COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III] VII THE GREEK VASE PHASE New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895--Twenty-One to Twenty-Three “THE YELLOW BOOK” It was near the New Year of 1894 that Aubrey Beardsley and his sister Mabel Beardsley moved into the young fellow’s second Pimlico home in London, at 114 Cambridge Street, Warwick Square, which Vallance decorated for him with orange walls and black woodwork, with its much talked-of black and orange studio. How dull and stale it all sounds today! Here Beardsley made his bid for a place in the social life of London. Every Thursday afternoon he and his sister, and generally his mother, were “At Home” to visitors. Beardsley, dressed with scrupulous care to be in the severest good taste and fashion, delighted to play the host--and an excellent host he was. All his charming qualities were seen at their best. The lanky, rather awkward, angular young man, pallid of countenance, stooped and meagre of body, with his “tortoise-shell coloured hair” worn in a smooth fringe over his white forehead, was the life and soul of his little gatherings. He paid for it with “a bad night” always when the guests were departed. Beardsley greatly liked his walls decorated with the stripes running from ceiling to floor in the manner he so much affects for the designs of his interiors such as the famous drawing of the lady standing at her dressing-table known as _La Dame aux Camélias_. The couch in his studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much of his all too short life lying upon it. * * * * *