In the summer term of '93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford. 🔊 It drove deep; it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. 🔊 Dons and undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it. 🔊 Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. 🔊 Its name? Will Rothenstein. 🔊 Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in lithograph. 🔊 These were to be published from the Bodley Head, London. 🔊 The matter was urgent. 🔊 Already the warden of A, and the master of B, and the Regius Professor of C had meekly "sat." 🔊 Dignified and doddering old men who had never consented to sit to any one could not withstand this dynamic little stranger. 🔊 He did not sue; he invited: he did not invite; he commanded. 🔊 He was twenty-one years old. 🔊 He wore spectacles that flashed more than any other pair ever seen. 🔊 He was a wit. 🔊 He was brimful of ideas. 🔊 He knew Whistler. 🔊 He knew Daudet and the Goncourts. 🔊 He knew every one in Paris. 🔊 He knew them all by heart. 🔊 He was Paris in Oxford. 🔊 It was whispered that, so soon as he had polished off his selection of dons, he was going to include a few undergraduates. 🔊 It was a proud day for me when I—I was included. 🔊 I liked Rothenstein not less than I feared him; 🔊 and there arose between us a friendship that has grown ever warmer, and been more and more valued by me, with every passing year. 🔊

At the end of term he settled in, or, rather, meteoritically into, London. 🔊 It was to him I owed my first knowledge of that forever-enchanting little world-in-itself, Chelsea, and my first acquaintance with Walter Sickert and other August elders who dwelt there. 🔊 It was Rothenstein that took me to see, in Cambridge Street, Pimlico, a young man whose drawings were already famous among the few—Aubrey Beardsley by name. 🔊 With Rothenstein I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head. 🔊 By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the domino-room of the Cafe Royal. 🔊