I met Frankie's father, Mr Hartnell, at the ‘Logos’ Club soon after my arrival in England. When I first heard this pretentious name, I was for some reason immediately reminded of a scene from ‘The Learned Ladies’ in which Trissotin introduces Vadius to the ladies and thrills them with his announcement that the latter knows Greek. I thought the ‘Logos’ was something like the academy of pedants proposed by Philaminte and Armande. ‘Nul n’aura de l’esprit, hors nous et nos amis!’

I was mistaken. The ‘Logos’ proved to be a regular English club: not the ‘Carlton’, which represents the fondest dream of every nouveau-riche brewer or brace manufacturer; not the ‘Athenaeum’ – a conclave of literary and political cardinals; not the ‘Savage Club’, where millionaires dressed up as for a ball turn up to play at bohemianism. No, the ‘Logos’ turned out to be a middle-of-the-road club with nothing pedantic about it except its name. One could occasionally meet a ruddy-cheeked lord there who for some reason considered himself a radical and was forever laughing at his own jokes, or a couple of politicians who had dropped by ‘for the connections’, just in case. But these were not the usual kind of visitors. The club's habitués were artists whose paintings had not yet begun to sell (this explains why such a mass of paintings adorned the club's walls), young novelists just spreading their wings, journalists, people of modest independent means, etc. These people were at times a bit too original and overdid their paradoxes a little; but on the whole they were an amiable set, not constrained by a worship of convention and therefore more akin in spirit to us Continentals. This is why the ‘Logos’ could boast such a motley collection of foreigners, ranging from the inhabitants of Ecuador to Norwegians. But if the ‘Logos’ differed from other clubs in its patrons, it did possess two things without which no Englishman would acknowledge such an establishment: soft, thick carpets and an abundance of deep armchairs to climb into and either pull your legs up or stretch them out to the brightly blazing fire – indeed, to climb into and adopt any position, even curl up into a ball.