Read "Far off Things" by Arthur Machen online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
One night a year or so ago I was the guest of a famous literary society.
This society, or club, it is well known, believes in celebrating literature -- and all sorts of other things -- in a thoroughly agreeable and human fashion. It meets not in any gloomy hall or lecture room, it has no gritty apparatus of blackboard, chalk, and bleared water-bottle. It summons its members and its guests to a well-known restaurant of the West End, it gives them red and white roses for their button-holes, and sets them down to an excellent dinner and good red wine at a gaily decked table, flower garlanded, luminous with many starry lamps.