I met them five years ago, during the yearly visit south; saw them on several occasions at Bath and Bristol; stayed with them at the Bell in Malmesbury; and for three years spent Christmas at Whitehouse Terrace. With others who knew them, I see in their death an epoch ended.

It was not merely that they had survived from the ‘nineties, not even that they had been at the centre of that society. Each of them in his way had shaped himself to the new age; they read, made friends, and generally lived, with zest, while they kept without display those gifts which they did not see renewed around them—certain courtesies, a certain social sense, certain refinements of understatement. Hence their charm, hence their elusion of many who would have courted them had they taken a conventionally veteran air. When in 1931 Canon Gray published his Poems, the clerical reviews observed that a well-known parish priest had written a book of verse; the secular referred briefly to the modernisms of Mr. Gray. Amateurs of the Yellow Book period were still seeking copies of Silverpoints.

In private they did not discourse on the past, but there were allusions; most often to Beardsley and his sister, sometimes to Pater or Lionel Johnson. If one heard mass at St. Peter’s early in January, one’s prayers were asked for the soul of Paul Verlaine. A chance naming of Dowson permitted me a question on Cynara; it was well received. Yes, she was as Symons had described her; tris gentille; no one saw her much, not Dowson himself. So far one might go; but any plot to elicit a narrative would have been delicately countered.