Fox came in again.

“Very sorry, my dear fellow, find I can’t possibly get a moment for a chat with you.  Look here, come and dine with me at the Paragraph round the corner—­to-night at six sharp.  You’ll go to Churchill’s to-morrow.”

The Paragraph Club, where I was to meet Fox, was one of those sporadic establishments that spring up in the neighbourhood of the Strand.  It is one of their qualities that they are always just round the corner; another, that their stewards are too familiar; another, that they—­in the opinion of the other members—­are run too much for the convenience of one in particular.

In this case it was Fox who kept the dinner waiting.  I sat in the little smoking-room and, from behind a belated morning paper, listened to the conversation of the three or four journalists who represented the members.  I felt as a new boy in a new school feels on his first introduction to his fellows.

There was a fossil dramatic critic sleeping in an arm-chair before the fire.  At dinner-time he woke up, remarked: 

“You should have seen Fanny Ellsler,” and went to sleep again.

Sprawling on a red velvet couch was a beau jeune homme, with the necktie of a Parisian-American student.  On a chair beside him sat a personage whom, perhaps because of his plentiful lack of h’s, I took for a distinguished foreigner.

They were talking about a splendid subject for a music-hall dramatic sketch of some sort—­afforded by a bus driver, I fancy.

I heard afterward that my Frenchman had been a costermonger and was now half journalist, half financier, and that my art student was an employee of one of the older magazines.

“Dinner’s on the table, gents,” the steward said from the door.  He went toward the sleeper by the fire.  “I expect Mr. Cunningham will wear that arm-chair out before he’s done,” he said over his shoulder.

“Poor old chap; he’s got nowhere else to go to,” the magazine employee said.

“Why doesn’t he go to the work’ouse,” the journalist financier retorted.  “Make a good sketch that, eh?” he continued, reverting to his bus-driver.

“Jolly!” the magazine employee said, indifferently.

“Now, then, Mr. Cunningham,” the steward said, touching the sleeper on the shoulder, “dinner’s on the table.”

“God bless my soul,” the dramatic critic said, with a start.  The steward left the room.  The dramatic critic furtively took a set of false teeth out of his waistcoat pocket; wiped them with a bandanna handkerchief, and inserted them in his mouth.

He tottered out of the room.

I got up and began to inspect the pen-and-ink sketches on the walls.

The faded paltry caricatures of faded paltry lesser lights that confronted me from fly-blown frames on the purple walls almost made me shiver.

“There you are, Granger,” said a cheerful voice behind me.  “Come and have some dinner.”