As for Elizabeth, she rather went to pieces. With her father’s allowance, which doubled and became her own income when he died, and her widow’s pension, she was quite well off as poor people of the “artistic” sort go. She travelled a good deal, always with a pretty large brandy flask, and had more lovers than were good for her—or them. I hadn’t seen her for years, until about a month ago I ran into her on the corner of the Piazzetta in Venice. She was with Stanley Hopkins, one of those extremely clever young novelists who oscillate between women and homosexuality. He had recently published a novel so exceedingly clever, so stupendously smart and up-to-date and witty and full of personalities about well-known people, that he was quite famous, especially in America, where all Hopkins’s brilliantly quacking and hissing and kissing geese were taken as melodious swans and (vide press) as a “startling revelation of the corruption of the British Aristocracy!” We went and had ices together, all three, at Florians; and then Hopkins went off to get something, and left us together for half an hour. Elizabeth chattered very wittily—you had to be witty with Hopkins or die of shame and humiliation—but never mentioned George. George was a drab bird from a drab past. She told me that she and Hopkins would not marry, they had both determined never to pollute themselves with the farce of “legalized copulation,” but they would “probably go on living with each other.” Hopkins, who was a very rich young man as well as a successful novelist, had settled a thousand a year on her, so that they could both be “free.” She looked as nearly unmiserable as our cynical and battered generation can look; but she still had the brandy flask. * * * * *