There was also, I remember, a description of the whole party running for early coffee, which gave Boon ample and regrettable opportunities for speculations upon the _déshabille_ of his contemporaries. Much of the detail of that invention I prefer to forget, but I remember Mr. Shaw was fully prepared for the emerging with hand-painted pyjamas, over which he was wearing a saffron dressing-gown decorated in green and purple scrolls by one of the bolder artists associated with Mr. Roger Fry, and as these special train allusions are all that I can ever remember Boon saying about Shaw, and as the drawing does in itself amount to a criticism, I give it here.... [Illustration: _How Mr. Shaw knocked them all on Bâle platform, and got right into the middle of the picture. Remark his earnest face. This surely is no mountebank._] § 2 Boon was greatly exercised over the problem of a president. "Why have a president?" Dodd helped. "There must be a Presidential Address," said Boon, "and these things always do have a president." "Lord Rosebery," suggested Wilkins. "Lord Morley," said Dodd. "Lord Bryce." Then we looked at one another. "For my own part," said Boon, "if we are going in for that sort of thing, I favour Lord Reay. "You see, Lord Reay has never done anything at all connected with literature. Morley and Bryce and Rosebery have at any rate written things--historical studies, addresses, things like that--but Reay has never written anything, and he let Gollancz make him president of the British Academy without a murmur. This seems to mark him out for this further distinction. He is just the sort of man who would be made--and who would let himself be made--president of a British affair of this sort, and they would hoist him up and he would talk for two or three hours without a blush. Just like that other confounded peer--what was his name?--who bored and bored and bored at the Anatole France dinner.... In the natural course of things it would be one of these literary lords...." "What would he say?" asked Dodd. "Maunderings, of course. It will make the book rather dull. I doubt if I can report him at length.... He will speak upon contemporary letters, the lack of current achievement.... I doubt if a man like Lord Reay ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes what these British literary aristocrats do with all their time. Probably he left off reading somewhere in the eighties. He won't have noted it, of course, and he will be under the impression that nothing has been written for the past thirty years." "Good Lord!" said Wilkins. "And he'll say that. Slowly. Steadily. Endlessly. Then he will thank God for the English classics, ask where now is our Thackeray? where now our Burns? our Charlotte Brontë? our Tennyson? say a good word for our immortal bard, and sit down amidst the loud applause of thousands of speechlessly furious British and American writers...." "I don't see that this will help your book forward," said Dodd.