ed to us there that we could.

The Academy, only the week before, had given us the same chance to meet,
the same chance to talk, the same chance to lunch together, and of the
lunch it had got to be our habit to make a Press Day function. Nowadays
at the Academy Press View, when I am hungry, I run up to Stewart's at
the corner of Bond Street for a couple of sandwiches, and excellent they
are, but, as I eat them in my solitary corner, no flight of my sluggish
imagination can make them seem to me more than a stern necessity. There
was, however, a festive air about the old Press Day lunch when, towards
one o'clock, some six or eight of us adjourned to Solferino's, another
vanished landmark of my younger days in London. It was in Rupert Street,
the street of Prince Florizel's Divan, which was appropriate, for Bob
Stevenson was always with us and but for Bob Prince Florizel might never
have existed to run a Divan in Rupert or any other street. Solferino's
had a Barsac that Bob liked to order, chiefly I fancy for all it
represented to him of Paris and Lavenue's and Barbizon and student days,
and the old memories warming him over it as lunch went on, he would
unfold one theory of art after another until suddenly a critic, more
nervous than the rest, would take out his watch, and the hour he saw
there would send us post-haste back to Piccadilly and the Academy, which
at that time thought one Press Day sufficient.

But the lunch that seemed a festivity at Solferino's never gave us the
holiday sense Paris filled us with from the early hour in the morning
when, after our little breakfast, we met downstairs in the unpretentious
hotel in the Rue St. Roch where most of us stayed--if we did not stay
instead at the Hotel de l'Univers et Portugal for the sake of the name.
The Rue St. Roch was convenient and if we were willing to climb to the
top of the narrow house, where the smell of dinner hung heavy on the
stairs all through the afternoon and evening, we could have our room for
the next to nothing at all that suited our purse, and the
dining-room--the Coffee Room in gilt letters on its door would have
frightened us from it in any case--was so tiny it was a kindness to the
_patron_ not to come back for the midday breakfast or the dinner that we
could not have been induced to eat in the hotel, under any
circumstances, for half the big price he charged. The day's talk was
already in full swing as we steamed down the Seine, or walked unde