“Splendid,” I said.  “Where?”

“Oh!  The Hanover, of course!” she answered.

“Where’s that?” I inquired.

“Don’t you know the Hanover Tea-rooms in Regent Street?” she exclaimed, staggered.

I have often noticed that metropolitan resorts which are regarded by provincials as the very latest word of London style, are perfectly unknown to Londoners themselves.  She led me along Vigo Street to the Hanover.  It was a huge white place, with a number of little alcoves and a large band.  We installed ourselves in one of the alcoves, with supplies of China tea and multitudinous cakes, and grew piquantly intimate, and then she explained her visit to my tailor’s.  I propose to give it here as nearly in her own words as I can.

I

I wouldn’t tell you anything about it (she said) if I didn’t know from the way you talk sometimes that you are interested in people.  I mean any people, anywhere.  Human nature!  Everybody that I come across is frightfully interesting to me.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve got so many friends—­and enemies.  I have, you know.  I just like watching people to see what they do, and then what they’ll do next.  I don’t seem to mind so much whether they’re good or naughty—­with me it’s their interestingness that comes first.  Now I suppose you don’t know very much about my nephew, Ellis Carter.  Just met him once, I think, and that’s all.  Don’t you think he’s handsome?  Oh!  I do.  I think he’s very handsome.  But then a man and a woman never do agree about what being handsome is in a man.  Ellis is only twenty, too.  He has such nice curly hair, and his eyes—­haven’t you noticed his eyes?  His father says he’s idle.  But all fathers say that of their sons.  I suppose you’ll admit anyhow that he’s one of the best-dressed youths in the Five Towns.  Anyone might think he got his clothes in London, but he doesn’t.  It seems there’s a simply marvellous tailor in Bursley, and Ellis and all his friends go to him.  His father is always grumbling at the bills, so his mother told me.  Well, when I was at their house in July, there happened to come for Ellis one of those fiat boxes that men’s tailors always pack suits in, and so I thought I might as well show a great deal of curiosity about it, and I did.  And Ellis undid it in the breakfast-room (his father wasn’t there) and showed me a lovely blue suit.  I asked him to go upstairs and put it on.  He wouldn’t at first, but his sisters and I worried him till he gave way.

He came downstairs again like Solomon in all his glory.  It really was a lovely suit.  No—­seriously, I’m not joking.  It was a dream.  He was very shy in it.  I must say men are funny.  Even when they really like having new clothes and cutting a figure, they simply hate putting them on for the first time.  Ellis is that way.  I don’t know how many suits that boy hasn’t got—­sheer dandyism!—­and yet he’ll keep a new suit in the house a couple of months before wearing it!  Now that’s the sort of thing that I call “interesting.”  So curious, isn’t it?  Ellis wouldn’t keep that suit on.  No; as soon as we’d done admiring it he disappeared and changed it.