Our clothes were for the most part unadventurous like our
conversation, though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose
tie and a very old Inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty
years before and preserved by my Sligo-born mother whose actions
were unreasoning and habitual like the seasons. But no other
member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who wore a loose tie, and
Symons, who had an Inverness cape that was quite new & almost
fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any costume
but 'that of an English gentleman.' 'One should be quite
unnoticeable,' Johnson explained to me. Those who conformed most
carefully to the fashion in their clothes generally departed
furthest from it in their hand-writing, which was small, neat and
studied, one poet--which I forget--having founded his upon the
handwriting of George Herbert. Dowson and Symons I was to know
better in later years when Symons became a very dear friend, and I
never got behind John Davidson's Scottish roughness and
exasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first I
devoted myself to Lionel Johnson.
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