“Don’t we cross?” muttered Hilary, and we crossed towards Jermyn Street, for the Loyalty Club lies in Pall Mall, to the end that, in immediate contact with the Royal Automobile Club, it may at least boast, as might occur to a student of Ruskin, a degree of eminence in the abyss. One is, one can’t help being, impelled by a sense of decorum to disavow at once any connection which may be fancied by worldly readers between the Loyalty Club and the Embassy Club. Such connection could not, of course, be fancied if the Loyalty were so well known as the Embassy; but the Loyalty is, or was--yes, was--the daughter of the Embassy, and although it is not yet so well known to the people of the town, who shall say that a daughter is not more of the mode than her mother? Even, life being what it is, in spite of the mother. The Loyalty sprang from the Embassy, and it sprang in a polite direction, from Bond Street down the hill of Saint James’s to Pall Mall, where it might lie over against Carlton House Terrace. It sprang because certain persons of _ton_ had found that the Mother Society, while never ordered but with the most polite amenities, was growing perhaps just a little crowded with what-nots; had, by banding themselves in a body financial and social, founded the Loyalty; and were there assured of more freedom for the exercise of a reasonable exclusiveness since, the floor-space of the Loyalty being large enough to accommodate only one hundred and fifty dancers, the membership was strictly limited to one thousand and five hundred. Below were a swimming-bath and squash-courts, besides the more orthodox facilities; and while the whole place was appointed with the severest economy, if not with downright meanness, it is well known that those who spend more than a certain amount of money for supper, and see other people spending as much, will need no other assurance of being in surroundings of the first quality. That is a well-known French invention, of which England has only recently acquired the recipe. The Loyalty Club can, however, claim no historical notice but in the person of the Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, its _directeur du restaurant_. We need not interrupt ourselves here to envy the salary at which the Chevalier was with difficulty persuaded to leave his retreat at Rapallo; but that he was worth it nobody can gainsay, for wheresoever Risotto went he took with him his invention. His invention he called _l’aristocracie internationale_; his name, you understand, for his people; they loved it.