It happened eight years ago, when I had just arrived in London and was living at a pension or boarding house. These boarding houses, or, more precisely, the colourful personages who inhabit them, merit a few words. A most curious company gathers in the evenings in the drawing rooms, with their stereotypical and cheerless furnishings. Most are foreigners. First and foremost, without fail, there is a ruddy-cheeked German, a commercial traveller or bank clerk. He tries his hardest to anglicise his appearance: wears very high turndown collars which cause his head to resemble a whorl of red cabbage with its stalk wrapped in white paper, talks about sport, and even shaves off his curled-up Wilhelm moustache. In his free time, the German clerk talks to the other guests about Germany's military strength. If there are any young ladies living in the boarding house, the German will not fail to declaim to them, rolling his eyes, some sentimental verses of this kind:

The young man explains to the uncomprehending young ladies that this is very good poetry, though far from the best in German literature. The English misses purse their lips and reply with the stock phrase:

‘Is it? Very nice indeed!’

If the boarding house is located in the quarter bounded by Montague Street, [New] Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, some of the lodgers will inevitably be Russians who have come ‘to the British Museum’: for the most part young Master's students, awkward, clumsy, and possessing only a theoretical knowledge of the English language.