of expensive restaurants, whirling your precarious way through littered and
abandoned tea-tables; and at dinner-time you leap up madly before the fish
and dance like variety artistes in a highly-polished arena before a crowd
of complete strangers eating their food; or, as if seized with an
uncontrollable craving for the dance, you fling out after the joint for one
wild gallop in an outer room, from which you return, perspiring and
dyspeptic, to the consumption of an ice-pudding, before dashing forth to
the final orgy at a picture-gallery, where the walls are appropriately
covered with pictures of barbaric women dressed for the hot weather.

That is what happened at this dinner. As soon as you had started a nice
conversation with a lady a sort of roaring was heard without; her eyes
gleamed, her nostrils quivered like a horse planning a gallop, and in the
middle of one of your best sentences she simply faded away with some
horrible man at the other end of the table who was probably "the only man
in London who can do the Double Straddle properly." This went on the whole
of the meal, and it made connected conversation quite difficult. For my own
part I went on eating, and when I had properly digested I went out and
looked at the little victims getting their money's worth.

From the door of the room where the dancing was done a confused uproar
overflowed, as if several men of powerful physique were banging a number of
pokers against a number of saucepans, and blowing whistles, and occasional
catcalls, and now and then beating a drum and several sets of huge cymbals,
and ceaselessly twanging at innumerable banjoes, and at the same time
singing in a foreign language, and shouting curses or exhortations or
street cries, or imitating hunting-calls and the cry of the hyena, or
uniting suddenly in the war-whoop of some pitiless Sudan tribe.

It was a really terrible noise. It hit you like the back-blast of an