LONDON LUXURY.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XV, Issue 894, 25 April 1907, Page 22

LONDON LUXURY.

ONE SCENE. It is midday, and some carriages and motor-broughams draw up in Savoy Court. The doors swing open silently, and through them into a great hall of cream and gold and scarlet pass women in gowns as beautiful as those worn by the lovely ladies of musical comedy (some of them are the same gowns with the same ladies inside them), and men whose blue blood oozes out of them, if we may use a metaphor, at every pore. They are mostly young men, -clean brown moustaches, which sometimes match their boots. Sometimes, however,

the moustaches are black and the boots of patent leather. They wear tight-fit-ting top-coats and other accessories which are perfectly correct according to the latest Blue Book of Mayfair. So they pass through the hall across a mile as it seems, of red carpeting, to the great room beyond, which is a harmony of red, white and gold and delicate green, with a soft sunshine, of lamps upon the little snow-white tables. A string band is playing to a tinkling accompaniment of plates and glasses, and the subdued ripple of women’s laughter. It is a pleasant scene, not without beauty and a moral. ANOTHER SCENE. It is eleven o’clock at night, and in the great room downstairs the tables are crowded with people supping after the theatre, the women’s white gowns and cream shoulders, the men’s black clothes and white breastplate, giving a more pictorial effect to the saloon of scarlet and gold. In the hall and elsewhere page-boys are murmuring “344,” “209,” “135/’ tn a dreamy way, and sometimes finding the number personified by a woman who wears a tiara which does not look like paste, though you never can tell. Upstairs in the tight floors which are built round the quadrangle, with corridors that seem endless, there is silence, but not less luxury. On each of the corridors there are dainty suppers being eaten in rooms as beautiful in miniature as those downstairs. A Russian Grand Duke is entertaining a friend in his private suite, where the very bath-room is a picture in white marble. An Italian count is, we hope, saying his prayers before a bed with a coverlet beautifully embroidered, and then dreams of innocence in a roseate room, or one of mauve, or of pale gold. 1 In each of these four hundred bedrooms, where those who live with luxury do not always sleep quite soundly, there are bells and telephones by which almost anything in the world, from a gramophone to a tooth-pick, from a doctor to a hairdresser, may be ordered and obA tained in the twinkling of an eye.