A few nights before then I was with Conder in his studio when he told me this story that less than a week ago he had returned late at night with Stella; hearing strange noises inside the house, he had rushed to the pantry, where he managed to seize the burglar's legs at the moment when he was trying to escape through the window. There was a furious fight; Conder always prided himself on the strength he had shown in such an emergency; he punched and punished his captive; he locked him up for the night; next morning he marched him off to the police station. The last time I saw Conder was on the

2nd of May, 1907, at the Private View of the New English Art Club; he was vague and dejected, obviously very ill; he talked to me wearily of the need of rest. On Sunday night, while he was painting, he suddenly said: "I feel as if I were going to faint." He went and lay down on a sofa, and as he tried to talk could not find the right words.

I met Oscar Wilde in 1894; he often invited me to his house, 16 Tite Street, a house Godwin decorated with an elegance that certainly owed something to Whistler. In one of his letters to me Wilde said: "I look forward to an evening with you, and to a talk about French Art, the one art now in Europe which is worth discussing-Verlaine's art especially. Who has parodied our dear Pater in the Cornhill? It is clever and horrid. The one on Kipling is excellent -one had merely to reproduce a caricature of him and of literature."

Wilde, whose curiosity was insatiable, often strolled into "The Crown," a semi-literary tavern chosen for its convenient position between the stage-doors

of the Empire and the Alhambra, always just before the closing hour. Lord Alfred Douglas, if I rightly remember, strolled in at least once with Wilde: as a man he was much more fascinating, much more gifted as a poet, than his elder. Wilde at that time was more than ever reckless, insolent, too certain of himself; he was shadowed and tracked by his evil reputation.

About seven years ago I saw a good deal of a strange girl who lived at Chelsea; we used to call her Jenny: that was not her real name: I invented it after Rossetti's. Year after year, on alternative nights, she was to be seen-alone or with some other girl-at the Café Royal, and, of course, at the Eiffel Tower, which is far and away the most amusing night-haunt in London. There is the inevitable Me Stulik, the Vortex room; and I must give Michael Arlen's minute description, in his "Piracy" of what he calls Mont Angel. "On the right is the door of the hotel, a door of a very different air to the other, a sealed and reticent looking door, with a tiny navel through which a worldly eye may judge of your business: a door, in fact, with the secret air of having very important business of its own as a door, which indeed it has." "Or," he continues, "was it, as an after thought, nothing to have sat and watched the bearded and significant figure of M. Stutz's most considerable patron-an epic figure, that! and to have wondered whether that silent detachment betokened a great artist or a great vagabond?"

Jenny, often to be found at the Cado gan Arms, one of the landmarks in Chelsea, placed so conveniently at the corner of two streets; at the Cavendish

Hotel in Jermyn street that has qualities, unique in their kind, exotic and singular; at the Cave of Harmony in Soho, where there is a small stage, where people flock in at the most uncertain hours of the night and leave at equally uncertain hours, after some entertainment-which becomes more amazing after one o'clock; or after some one act play which has been composed for it by a versatile young writer who I understand is the original of the incredibly tall William Erasmus who comes into Mr. Osbort Sitwell's "The Machine Breaks Down," a cruel and unjustifiable, amusing and malicious, scandalous and scathing piece of work; some of which having been read aloud in Paris -I hope in French-seems to have pleased the painter whose painting and whose personality always appealed to me and to the boxer whose prowess is certainly proverbial. I shall not mention the various night clubs in various quarters of London Jenny haunted, nor the other taverns which have given names and no particular reputations, nor her periodical disappearances abroad; only the fact that she was seen in Chelsea on the last day of January. She always had a curious fascination of an evil kind; and with that a kind of diabolical beauty which could become, as she became, exasperating. At times she reminded one of "La Scorpine" in Cladel's novel, with her clear profile, her nervous dark inexorable eyes; with something in her regard that was infernal. When she was in one of her furies she seemed to me almost the image of that painted female viper in Vigny's greatest poem. One night, it was on New Year's Eve, I went with an Eastern woman who has

the passion and the magnetism of her race to a reception given by Augustus John in his studio in Chelsea. Jenny, of course, was there, smoking, rushing to and fro, among that crowd that surges, reckless as the waves, between the dances and the drinks. There was also Betty, who changes from good to bad in a most unconventional fashion, one never knows why; there was Helen, who began by looking exotic and wearing coloured and barbaric dresses and then became less interesting; Lilian, who reminded me of the depraved little ballet-girl in "La Femme-Enfant” of Catulle Mendès: Liliane, whose virginal innocence of face is but the flower of a soul in which vice has sprung, a type which has never been so perfectly expressed before-Liliane, a girl I actually met in Paris on the Boulevard des Italiens one night when I was returning from Montmatre; she was in a carriage, she waved her hand to me, I jumped in beside her. I must not forget that wonderful Sylvia, who confessed to her Irish and Spanish blood, who was never quiet, who was stirred by her violent emotions, swayed by her wilder passions; she was feverish and feline. Rather to my surprise the Eastern woman admired Jenny more than the others; only, as I was taking my friend back she said: "Curious, the effect on me of that girl's face. Yet, what I want is, when one comes out into the hot sunshine that warms one's blood, to see the eager hungering faces of men and women in the street, dramatic faces over which the disturbing influences of life have passed and left their symbols; then one's heart thrills up into one's throat."