I recall the next day, Sunday, with as much interest as any date, for on that day I encountered my first London drawing-room. When I reached the house of Mrs. W., which was in one of those lovely squares that constitute a striking feature of the West End, I was ushered up-stairs to the drawing-room, where I found my host, a rather practical, shrewd-looking Frenchman, and his less obviously French wife. “Oh, Mr. Der_riz_er,” exclaimed my hostess on sight, as she came forward to greet me, a decidedly engaging woman of something over forty, with bronze hair and ruddy complexion. Her gown of green silk, cut after the latest mode, stamped her in my mind as of a romantic, artistic, eager disposition. “You must come and tell us at once what you think of the picture we are discussing. It is down-stairs. Lady B. is there, and Miss N. We are trying to see if we can get a better light on it. Mr. X. has told me of you. You are from America. You must tell us how you like London, after you see the Degas.” I think I liked this lady thoroughly at a glance and felt at home with her, for I know the type. It is the mobile, artistic type, with not much practical judgment in great matters, but bubbling with enthusiasm, temperament, life. “Certainly; delighted. I know too little of London to talk of it. I shall be interested in your picture.” [Illustration: Drawn by W. J. Glackens “‘I LIKE IT,’ HE PRONOUNCED. ‘THE NOTE IS SOMBER, BUT IT IS EXCELLENT WORK’”] We had reached the main floor by this time. “Mr. Der_riz_er, the Lady B.,” said Mrs. W., as she brought me forward to meet the ladies. A modern suggestion of the fair _Jehanne_, tall, astonishingly lissome, done, as to clothes, after the best manner of the romanticists, such was the Lady B. A more fascinating type, from the point of view of stagecraft, I never saw. And the languor and lofty elevation of her gestures and eyebrows defy description. She could say, “Oh, I am so weary of all this!” with a slight elevation of her eyebrows a hundred times more definitely and forcefully than if it had been shouted for her in stentorian tones through a megaphone. She gave me the fingers of an archly poised hand. “It is a pleasure.” “And Miss N., Mr. Der_riz_er.” Again it was Mrs. W. who spoke. “I am very pleased.” A pink, slim lily of a woman of twenty-eight or thirty, seemingly very fragile, very Dresden-china-like as to color, a dream of light and Tyrian blue with some white interwoven, very keen as to eye, the perfection of hauteur as to manner, so well-bred that her voice seemed subtly suggestive of it all--that was Miss N.