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I read the review word by word and examined the caricature very closely. The article was amazingly good, but, as I read it, I did so wish it had been written about a book by somebody else. Frank Harris himself, I think, had written the article and Frank Richardson had drawn the caricature. I looked up at Shaw and smiled.

“Awfully good, don’t you think?” I said.

He nodded, and by his manner seemed to express approval of the way in which I had come through the ordeal. He showed me some photographs he had taken—not very good photographs. One, taken by his wife, I think, showed Bernard Shaw with his arm round a female scarecrow; leaning slightly forward, he was leering at it with narrowed eyes.

ssss1During lunch Shaw devoured a large number of vegetarian dishes and drank water, whilst MrsShaw and I ate meat and drank wine. It was, I think, the mellowing influence of a basin of raisins that loosed his tongue and set him talking without cessation. He spoke of Karl Marx and Granville Barker, of MrsAnnie Besant and Janet Achurch, of MrSidney Webb and the Fabian Society, of Morocco and Ancoats, of Shorthand and Wagner, of The Manchester Guardian and H.G. Wells ... in a word, of Shakespeare and the musical glasses.