Beggars

Thursday, October 16th., Cadogan Square, London.

I noticed last night for the first time that the lamps in the Square at this date are lighted by lamplighters.

Dinner party at Wells's last night. This party was apparently got up to meet Margaret Sanger. G.B.S. left silently immediately after dinner. Mrs. Shaw stayed on. E. W. McBride, zoologist, is a very jolly, boyish, comic-looking clever old man.

Ernest William MacBride (1866, Belfast - 1940, Alton, Hampshire) was a British/Irish marine biologist. A defender of Lamarckian evolution, MacBride's specialism was the morphology and embryology of the Echinoderms. MacBride supported Paul Kammerer’s claims to have demonstrated Lamarckian inheritance in the Midwife Toad. MacBride took an active part both in the affairs of the Linnean Society which he served as a member of its council and as Vice-president, and the Zoological Society where he also served on the council for over thirty years and acted as Vice-president.

This morning two black nuns, heavily draped, begging in Ovington Street. They walked up the narrow front steps exactly side by side. The senior held the book, morocco bound. The junior rang the bell then they stood side by side, the junior with crossed arms. While waiting they faced right angles to the door. At one house they were evidently refused at once. They descended the steps side by side. At the next house they stayed a minute or two and probably got something. Meme jeu. I saw them mount the steps of a third house.

The day before yesterday I was passing down towards King's Road, when a shabby young man with three medals on his coat held out a bag to me. I am always inveighing against the sin of charity in the street; but there was something painfully silly and futile in the aspect of this young man, and I stopped., and said "Look here, I object to this sort of thing. However ..." And I threw 6d. into his bag. "Good luck to you sir," he said, foolishly. I then noticed another young man with a barrel organ in the gutter, and the organ started disgustingly playing. A rotten lapse on my part.

Additionally for October 16th., see 'Art' -
http://earnoldbennett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/art.html

London yesterday. Show of French drawings about the war at Leicester Galleries.