Old Lady (collecting herself): “Never mind. You had better sign your autograph, all the same.”
And, not knowing whether to laugh or scowl, Sir Lewis Morris put on his glasses and wrote his name, then turning to me, said:
“Well, that was a funny adventure.”
Bernard Shaw himself arrived a little later, and sitting near us, waited for the moment when he was to get up and reply for the drama. Being a vegetarian, he had avoided the first part of the dinner.
A merry twinkle hung round his eye all the time he talked, and with true Irish brogue he duly pronounced all his wh’s as such, and mixed up will and shall! His red beard was almost grey, and his face has become older and more worn since success weighed him down, and wealth oppressed him so deeply.
I could not agree with Lewis Morris’s self-depreciatory remark that few people “read my sort of stuff,” for I learnt on very excellent authority that publishers have sold more than forty-five thousand copies of his Epic of Hades—not bad for poetic circulation—and that this and the Songs of Two Worlds shared between them sixty editions.
Poor Lewis Morris died a few months after this little comedy occurred.
To continue with G. B. S., here may be given the recollection of a luncheon at his home one day.
From dinners to a luncheon!—well, that is no great digression. Longer, certainly, than from luncheon to dinner, with five o’clock tea thrown in. To part from Bernard Shaw is too impossible.
“Mrs. Bernard Shaw” is the name upon the little oak gate across the stairway leading to the second-floor flat near the Strand.