The Hyacinth Club has the reputation of selecting its members from among
the freshest and most active spirits in literature, science, and art.
That is in a sense true, but activity in one or another of those fields
is not a condition of membership; for, just as the listening Boswell was
the necessary complement of the talking Johnson, so in the Hyacinth Club
there is an indispensable contingent of passive members who find their
liveliest satisfaction in hearing and looking on, rather than in
speaking and doing. Something of the home principle of male and female
is necessary for the completeness even of a club.

The Hyacinth Club-house looks upon Piccadilly and the Green Park. The
favourite place of concourse of its members is the magnificent
smoking-room on the first floor, the bow-windows of which command a view
up and down the fashionable thoroughfare, and over the trees and the
undulating sward of the Park to the gates of Buckingham Palace. On a
Monday afternoon in the beginning of May, the bow-windows were open, and
several men sat in leather lounges (while one leaned against a
window-sash), luxuriously smoking, and noting the warm, palpitating life
of the world without. A storm which had been silently and doubtfully
glooming and gathering the night before had burst and poured in the
morning, and it was such a spring afternoon as thrills the heart with
new life and suffuses the soul with expectation--such an afternoon as
makes all women appear beautiful and all men handsome. The south-west
wind blew soft and balmy, and all nature rejoiced as the bride in the
presence of the bridegroom. The trees in the Park were full of sap, and
their lusty buds were eagerly opening to the air and the light. The
robin sang with a note almost as rich and sensuous as that of the
thrush; and the shrill and restless sparrows chirped and chattered about
the houses and among the horses' feet, and were as full of the joy of