Those occasional evenings were very good. I put away from myself writing and books--Louis hadn't really ever read anything but Kipling, "Ole-Luk-Oie" and "The Riddle of the Sands"-and I temporarily forgot Shelmerdene, and we dined right royally. I don't know what we talked about, perhaps we talked of nothing at all; but we talked all the time, and we laughed a great deal, and we still had the good old "_blasted roué_" touch about us. We were very, very old indeed, so old that we decided that the first act of no play or revue in the world could compensate one for a hurried dinner; and we were old enough to know that a confidential manner to _maitres d'hôtels_ is a thing to be cultivated, else a chicken is apt to be wizened and the sweet an unconscionable long time in coming. After dinner, a show, and then perhaps a night club, "to teach those gals how to dance." We founded a Club for Good Mannered People. I, as the founder, was the president of the club, and Louis the vice-president; there were no members because we unanimously black-balled every one whom, in a moment of weakness, one or other of us might propose. We decided, in the end, that the Club could never have any members except the president and vice-president, simply because the men of our own generation were the worst mannered crew God ever put within lounging distance of a drawing-room.... There must be something wrong, we said, in a world where public-school men could be recognised by the muddy footprints they left on other people's carpets. So it was obviously left to us to supply the deficiency of our generation, both as regards manners and everything else. We made a cult of good manners; Louis took to them as a cult where he had never taken to them as a necessity, and the happiest moments of his life were when he could work it off on to some helpless woman who had dropped an umbrella or a handkerchief. The Club, we decided, must never come to an end, it must go on being a Club until one or other of us should die ... and now the Club is no more, for suddenly a spring gave way, the world gave a lurch towards hell, and Louis stopped playing at soldiers to go away and be a real soldier, to die in his first attack with a bullet in his chest.... _The London Venture_: IX [Illustration] IX