ABSTRACT
in 1913 I joined an already mentioned friend, Mollie Clugston, in a flat she had recently taken. It was in Soho Square, on the third floor of a house that, with what truth I do not know, was said to have been part of the French Embassy at the time of the Revolution of 1789. My friend took it from O.P. Heggie, the actor, who on account of ill-health was leaving London. It was he who had decorated the largest room, with its crescent-shaped window overlooking the Square, in the style of an early Victorian inn-parlour. It had one of those golden-yellow mottled papers that one so often sees in the coffee-rooms of inns of that period, and an arched fireplace with a wide, tiled hearth. At the end of this long, low-ceiled room a door led through a lobby (with deep cupboards on either side in the thickness of the walls) into a charming parlour with the large white-moulded panelling characteristic of the Queen Anne period. Another entrance from the passage outside made it quite independent of the big room, and it was only when we gave parties that we opened the communicating doors. At such times the panelled parlour, my own private sitting-room, with its flowered chintz curtains at the two windows, formed a gay antechamber to the more austere and dignified room belonging to my friend.
