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By Root 1913 0

was open until ten in the evening, to close the Refreshment Corridor early, so that the rooms could be decorated with flowers, and a dais built for his regimental music-players: a fiddle, a cello, a flute, an oboe, a clarinet and a horn. Food was prepared in the Grill-Room, and fragile gilt chairs were scattered around the Centre Refreshment Room. This had been designed to be washable, or possible to swill out, with the result that it was set out entirely in ceramic tiles. It was a light room, with huge arched windows, of light stained glass. There was a domed ceiling, supported by immense majolica pillars made by Minton, in peppermint-green and creamy white majolica, with dancing putti, supporting a crown of coat-hooks, at shoulder height. The floor was tiled in chocolate, the dado was faced with dark tiles, between maroon and umber, and the walls were tiled in yellow, green, white, with strips and stripes of complicated running designs, a text from Ecclesiastes, in cream pottery on a red-brown ground: “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and make his soul enjoy good in his labour—XYZ.” Amorini cavorted and gambled along the dado. More decoration had been woven in, in more styles, than might seem possible. It was sumptuous and utilitarian, a cross between a fairy palace and a municipal dairy, with electric globes on gilded stems hanging from the ceiling.

The Royal College of Art backed onto this corridor, and Prosper Cain had judiciously invited both teachers and students from the College to make up his numbers. They came to the Refreshment Rooms from various directions, the guests, some through the great golden doors, which were originally designed to be the entrance from the Cromwell Road, some having wandered through those courtyards and corridors that were still open. There was a sullen background noise of thumping and slicing, from closed-off areas where Aston Webb’s prizewinning quadrangles and courts were at last being constructed. Olive held on to Humphry’s arm, and said that what with the dust that inevitably flew about the floor from the workings, and the dust-sheets that were thrown over various displaced glass cases, like palls over coffins, you felt you had entered both the palace of the Sleeping Beauty and the tomb of Snow White. The visitors to the gallery looked at the young women in their dance dresses and velvet cloaks as though they were a wedding-party, or an irruption from some other world.

In the dark, warm Grill-Room, with its blue and white tiles, and its ceramic panels of the Four Seasons, food was cooked and offered, patties of shrimp and trout, cups of consommé, confections of cherries and meringue and cream, a fruit punch shimmering and hissing icily in a great glass bowl, champagne with the bubbles wavering upwards in fine threads in misted, frosty glasses. In the Green Dining-Room the mothers and fathers could sit on more comfortable, Jacobean-style chairs.

Other military officers were there, with their wives, and Basil and Katharina, who was elegant in a gown with a lace overdress over black silk, with roses at her waist, and a short train behind. Seraphita was there, without her husband, who was, she said, packing a kiln with Philip. She was wound in a reddish-brown, flowing garment which by accident or design matched the twelve figures by Burne-Jones, representing the months, or the signs of the Zodiac with the sun and moon, no one was sure. She looked as though she belonged inside the dark green wallpaper with its woven willow boughs and dotted cherries and plums. Olive, on the other hand, was dressed for the dancing in the pillared hall, in a simple dress in a rich fabric, a darker green than the Minton pillars, with borders of gold and silver braid.

Prosper opened the dancing with Katharina and complimented her on Griselda’s beauty. Then he danced with Seraphita, who was taller than he was, and managed to be simultaneously graceful and ungainly, making exaggerated swoops, not on the beat. The young were clumped in separate clutches of males and females,