About the same time, Lewis Hind became editor of the now defunct _Pall Mall Budget_, and I carried out the same idea for him in a regular _causerie_, to which we gave the name of the _Diner-Out_, and which I signed “St. Barbe”—the family name of my maternal grandmother.
Between these three papers I was pretty fully occupied. But my mind was turning towards a more congenial form of journalism—the travel-article. Percy Cox, a son of the Horace Cox whose name appeared on the _Queen_ as its publisher for so many years, was anxious to develop its travel side, and while the late Sievers Drewett was organising the wonderful travel department, which now has its annual _Queen Book of Travel_, he employed me to write a series of articles on my travels in Greece and Turkey, and a regular travel-serial on the trans-continental journey across Canada, which I amplified and brought out as _On the Cars and Off_.
While I was doing these, Clement Shorter, who had been a sort of literary editor to the _Queen_—all the important books being sent to him, and he writing a sort of _causerie_ about them—became too busy with his offspring, the _Sketch_, to do any more work for the _Queen_, and I was offered his place. My suggestion that we should have a signed “book of the week” for the most important book—unsigned minor reviews to be worked in anywhere about the paper—and that I should do my _Diner-Out_ column for the _Queen_, instead of the _Pall Mall Budget_, was accepted, and I began my literary connection with the _Queen_, which lasted for so many years. I kept the _Diner-Out_ for biographical gossip about authors chiefly, and for announcements of forthcoming books, which could be made interesting by personal gossip. Actual reviewing I kept as far as possible out of that column. In those days, though the _Queen_ was and always had been the chief ladies’ paper, it had not nearly so many departments of feminine interest as it has now, so there was plenty of space for book-reviewing, which became a very important feature of the paper. I was only responsible for the _Book of the Week_ and the _Diner-Out_, though I did perhaps a page of unsigned minor reviews, which were never attributed to me.