The evening of two people who have already met

What is actually different

Less production. No itinerary recited at the door, no run of questions answered in order, no room booked for what is said about it rather than for what leaves its kitchen. She arrives, takes her coat off, asks how the week has genuinely been, and the evening finds its own shape from there. Most of the circle would rather conduct an evening this way, and a fair number are plainly better at it than at formality.

How such an evening tends to run

If there is a shape at all, it is a loose one. She arrives at six or seven with no plan beyond the first drink, and the two of you decide the rest as you go. Often that means a walk before anybody is hungry, supper at whichever small room has a table at eight, and a last hour back at your address with the evening's conversation still running. By the second or third meeting the first drink is frequently skipped altogether, because there is no longer any ice to break.

Why it improves the second time

A first evening with anybody spends its opening hour on groundwork: where you are from, what you do, what you like. A second evening skips all of that and starts somewhere considerably more interesting, and a third skips further still. Guests who ask for the same name repeatedly are usually asking for exactly this.

Delphine keeps a quiet note of whom you have seen, so a thread does not have to begin from nothing each time. That note is the only record of you this house keeps, and it goes when you ask for it to go.

The settings that suit it

A small room rather than a grand one. Supper somewhere with eight tables and a kitchen you can hear from them. An afternoon in Notting Hill built around a film, or a walk through Belgravia that takes twice as long as it should because every door on the terrace is worth stopping in front of. A coffee on Dover Street at six, before anything at all has been decided, is how Molly likes to begin an evening of this kind. The ninety minutes at £400 and the two hours at £500 both suit this better than a single hour does.

The names who do it most naturally

Molly is the least guarded woman here and is usually laughing before she has sat down. Laura wants to know what people actually do all day and keeps asking until she has understood it properly. Bianka returns to something you mentioned an hour earlier as though she had been holding it for you. Lucy can sit inside a silence without any need to end it, which very few people manage. Every page in the Salon carries enough of a woman to tell you whether she is one of these.

What to tell Delphine

Say that you would rather the evening were informal, since otherwise she will assume the house's usual care over every detail. Say too whether you have met anybody here before, and whom; a guest who liked one woman's company is often better suited still to a second, and Delphine is good at seeing which. Anything you would rather not talk about can go in the same message, and it is passed on without comment.

The limits of it, said out loud

This is not a relationship and nobody here will pretend that it is. It is a professional arrangement between adults for time and company, warmly conducted, and it stops when the hours stop. There is no claim of exclusivity, no correspondence between appointments, and nothing beyond her company is offered at any length or any figure.