By hello
In Robert Hichens's December Love, the Café Royal appears as a "packed crowd" of "smoke wreaths" and the possible presence of a "tipsy man of genius"—a concentrated image of noisy, performative literary London. (gutenberg.org) Walter Lionel George likewise described its clientele as a place whose "mixed public" had "numbered everybody who did something." Together these passages explain why authors chose it: the Café Royal lets a writer stage wit, status, pose, and artistic ambition in a single room. (gutenberg.org)