men in armchairs, its magazine room and library upstairs, have just

that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me

the Liberal note. The pensive member sits andhears perplexing

dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the

clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches

profiles and complexions that send hismind afield to Calcutta or

Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape…

I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the

Club todoubt about Liberalism.

About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with

countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in

circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the

great narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of

the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some

are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling oflonely,

dissociated men. At first one gets an impression of men going from

group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches

closely one finds that these men just visit three or four groups at

the outside, andknow nothing of the others. One begins toperceive

more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human

mosaic; that each patch in that great place is of a different

quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed with it.

Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in the

Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores

are specialised and sectional. As one looks round onesees here a

clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island

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