Mr. Russell, the host and adopted member of the Family, was fifty-two.  He did not know Jay, having only lately been culled by Mrs. Gustus—­that assiduous collector—­and placed in the bosom of the Family.  She had found him blossoming unloved in the wilderness of a War Work Committee.  He was well informed, yet a good listener; perhaps he possessed both these virtues to excess.  At any rate Mrs. Gustus had decided that he was worthy of Family friendship, and, being naturally extravagant, she conferred it upon him with both hands.  Mr. Russell was married to a woman who had not properly realised the fact that she was Mrs. Russell.  She spent her life in distant lands, helping the world to become better.  At present she was understood to be propagating peace in the United States, and was never mentioned by or to her husband.  My first impression of Mr. Russell was that he was rather fat, but I never could trace this impression to its origin.  He had not exactly a double chin, but rather a chin and a half, and the rest of him followed this moderate example.  His grey hair retired in a pronounced estuary over each temple, leaving a beautifully brushed peninsula between.  He had no sense of humour, but hid this deformity skillfully.  Hardly anybody knew that he was a poet, except presumably his dog.  He often talked to his dog; he told it every speakable thought that he had.  This was his only bad habit.  Occasionally his dog was heard to reply in a small curious voice proceeding also from Mr. Russell.

These four people looked out at Kensington Gardens, which were rejoicing in the very babyhood of the year.  The naked trees were like pillars in the mist, the grass was grey and whitened to the distance, the world had mislaid its horizon, and one’s eye slid up without check between the trees to where the last word of a daylight moon whispered in the sky.

“I glory in a view that dispenses with colour,” said Mrs. Gustus severely.  She always spoke as though she were sure of the whole of what she intended to say.  When she did hesitate, it only meant that she was seeking for the simplest word, and she would cap her pause with a monosyllable as curt as an explosion.

But glory is the right word, I think, for London in some moods.  Do you know the feeling of a heart beating too high, when you see the great cliffs of London under rain or vague sunshine, or rising out of yellow air?  Do you ever want, as I do, to stand with arms out against the London wind, and shout your own unmade poetry on the top of a ’bus?  With this sort of grotesque glorying does London inspire me, so that I spend whole days together feeling that the essential I is too big for what encloses it.

Anonyma never felt like this.  She often spoke the right word, but she nearly always spoke it coldly.