nly the Venetian can master the secret of doing nothing with nothing to
do it on, and if J. and I were to hope for figs with our bread, or even
for bread by itself, we had to move on to the next place where work
awaited us. And so the last of our nights in Venice came before spring
had ripened into summer, and the last of our mornings when porters again
scrambled for our bags, and we again stumbled after them up the long
platform; and then there were again yells, but this time of "_Partenza_"
and "_Pronti_," and the train hurried us away from the _Panada_, and the
_Orientale_, and the Lagoon, to a world where no lotus grows and life is
all labour.

IV

NIGHTS IN LONDON

IN LONDON

I

I cannot remember how or why we began our Thursday nights. I rather
think they began themselves and we kept them up to protect our days
against our friends.

It was an unusually busy time with us--or perhaps I ought to say with
me, for, to my knowledge, J. has never known the time that was anything
else. After our years of wandering, years of hotels and rooms and
lodgings, we had just settled in London in the first place we had ever
called our own--the old chambers in the old Buckingham Street house
overlooking the river; I was doing more regular newspaper work than I
had ever done before or ever hope to do again; we were in the
Eighteen-Nineties, and I need neither the magnifying glasses through
which age has the reputation of looking backward, nor the clever young
men of to-day who write about that delectable decade and no doubt
deplore my indiscretion in being alive to write about it myself, to show
me how very much more amusing and interesting life was then than now.

There is no question that people, especially people doing our sort of
work, were much more awake in the Nineties, much more alive, much more
keen about everything, even a fight, or above all a fight, if they
thought a fight would clear the air. Those clever young men,
self-appointed historians of a period they know only by hearsay, may
deplore or envy its decadence. But because a small clique wrote anaemic
verse and bragged of the vices for which they had not the strength,
because a few youthful artists invented new methods of expression the
outsider did not understand, that does not mean decadence. A period of
revolt against decadence, of insurrection, of vigorous warfare it seemed
to me who lived and worked through it. The Yellow Nineties, the Glor