HALKIN STREET,
Sunday, May 9th.
DEAREST ELSIE,
I have had a busy week since I have been back. Monday I dined with George at his flat. A man's dinner to meet some French politicians who are over here for a few days. I told you I was determined to make Mrs Housman's acquaintance, and I have. I had luncheon on Tuesday with Jimmy Randall, a city friend of mine. You don't know him. He knows the Housmans intimately. I told him I wanted to know them and he asked me to meet them last night.
We dined at the Carlton, Randall, the Housmans and myself. I think she is even more beautiful than I thought before. I couldn't take my eyes off her. She was in black, with one row of very good pearls. I never saw such eyes. Housman is too awful; sleek, fat and common beyond words, but sharp as a needle. He has an extraordinary laugh, a high, nasal chuckle, and says, "Ha! ha! ha!" after every sentence. They have asked me to dinner next Tuesday. I will write to you about it in detail. Mrs H. is charming. There is nothing American or Colonial about her, but she is curiously un-English. I can't understand how she can have married him. I caught sight of her again this morning at the Oratory, where I always go if I am in London on Sundays, for the music. Randall told me she is very musical, but I didn't get any speech with her.
The flat looks quite transformed with all the Paris things. They are the greatest success.
Yours,
G.
Wednesday, May 12th.
DEAREST ELSIE,
The dinner-party came off last night. They live in Campden Hill. I was early and the parlour-maid said Mrs Housman would be down directly, and I heard Housman shouting upstairs: "Clare, Clare, guests," but he did not appear himself. I was shown into a large white and heavily gilded drawing-room, with a candelabra, a Steinway grand, and light blue satin and ebony furniture, a good many palms, but no flowers. The drawing-room opened out on to an Oriental back drawing-room with low divans, small stools inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a silver lamp (from a mosque) hanging from the ceiling, heavy curtains too, behind which I suspect stained-glass windows. Over the chimney-piece an Alma Tadema (a group on a marble seat against a violet sea). At the other end of the room Walter Bell's picture. It was the picture I saw before, but more about that later. On another wall over a sofa a most extraordinary allegorical picture: a precipice bridged by a large serpent, and walking on the serpent two small figures, a woman in white draperies and a knight dressed like Mephistopheles, all these painted in the crudest colours. The Housmans then appeared, and Housman did the honours of the pictures, faintly damned the Alma Tadema, and said the Snake Picture was by Mucius of Munich in what he called Moderne style. He had picked it up for nothing; some day it would be worth pots of money. Ha! ha! Then the guests arrived. Sir Herbert Simcox, K.C., Lady Simcox, dressed in amber velvet and cairngorms; Housman's sister Miss Sarah, black, and very large, in yellow satin, with enormous emerald ear-rings; Carrington-Smith, Housman's partner; Mrs Carrington-Smith, naked except for a kind of orange and red Reform Kleid, with a green complexion, heavily blacked eyebrows, and a Lalique necklace. Then, making a late entrance, as if on the stage, a Princesse de Carignan, a fine figure, in rich and tight black satin and a large black ruff, heavily powdered. Housman whispered to me that she was a legitimate Bourbon. I think he meant a Legitimist. We went down to dinner into a dark Gothic panelled dining-room, with a shiny portrait of Mr Housman set in the panelling over the chimney-piece.
I sat between Mrs Housman and Mrs Carrington-Smith. I talked to Mrs Housman most of the time. Mrs Carrington-Smith asked me if I liked Henry James's books. I said I liked the early ones. She said she preferred the later ones, but she could never feel quite the same about Henry James again since he had put her into a book. She was, she said, Kate in The Wings of the Dove. After dinner Housman moved up and sat next to me. He talked about art and bric-à-brac. I asked him if I could possibly have seen Bell's portrait of Mrs Housman in America. He said, "Certainly." He had bought it cheap and sold it dear, anticipating a slump in Bell, which was not slow in coming. He had then bought it back directly Bell died, anticipating a boom, which had also occurred. "It is now worth double what I gave for it. Ha! ha! ha!"