If chance or design closed this safety-valve, the pent passion for romance would be driven inwards until it exploded in the very heart of domesticity. Intellectual adolescence must play at Bohemianism as youth plays at soldiers; it is better to restrict the game to one lawful area than to allow it to rage unconfined, for the English home is not adapted to absinthe-drinking, and a general repudiation of morality shocks without elevating. Under the unsettling influence of war, which closed the Café Royal at night before the taste for literary romance had been satisfied, there was a severe outbreak of studio-parties at which every one shewed himself conscientiously unrestrained and fearless; poets and painters discussed the aims and methods of their art; strange food and drink appeared disconcertingly; conversation was carried on in shouts; there was more colour than line in the dresses; every one sat on the floor until the host gave the signal for dancing; only Virginian cigarettes were smoked; and, at the end, it was never possible to find a taxi. It is to be hoped that the artists worked the better for this breezy liberation of soul; it is to be wished that they had done more and talked less of what they were going to do; but it is to be realised that they were unwitting and perhaps unwilling victims of a conspiracy to make London literary. This craving finds its frankest expression in the meetings of certain more formal literary seminars. Here, though the dresses, the intellectual freedom and the insufficiency of chairs are the same, there is strict procedure: the guest of the evening is received with deference and heard with attention; there follows a grave debate in which conventional compliments usher in a set speech of destructive criticism; after a vote of thanks, the address is once more examined in the candid atmosphere of lemonade and sandwiches, and the guest is asked whether he really meant all that he said. Rash is the man who trifles with such earnest desire for improvement: he might well find himself not invited a second time. III So much for the atmosphere which is imposed upon an author. If he be more man than peacock, flattery will bring him less gratification than embarrassment; and he may ask in modesty and wrath why he should be subjected to treatment from which others are exempt. The barrister is not forced to expound the principles of pleading to a hushed dinner-table; no one collects a party to meet the chairman of an insurance-company. The answer, presumably, would be that, while there is a legal London and a financial London, no one has yet created a literary London and all are entitled to try.