Great Ladies of London

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

1

AT the age of seventy-four, though she no longer rode to hounds, the activity of my Great-L aunt Blanche Sitwell was amazing. She would run up and down stairs like a young woman, and the many contradictory beliefs that inspired her conversation gave it a special quality, an earnest yet humorous vagueness. In spite of her own carelessness in matters of dress, in spite of her strong and unconventional radical views, she paid great attention to the manners, outward aspect, and even clothes, of her young relatives. Letters would rain down on me on subjects extending from the way one’s hair had been cut recently, and who was the best contemporary barber in London, to a discussion of tendencies on the English stage, the disestablishment of the Church, the experiences of her father’s old friend and brother-in-law, Sir Frederick Stovin, in the Peninsular War, the sweated-labor conditions in East End tailors’ shops, and the abolition of the House of Lords.

All these letters, it was understood, had to be answered immediately, or a frantic note would arrive, demanding the meaning of my silence. I don’t, know that my aunt and I shared many interests; but this in no way spoiled our friendship. At least we shared two: a universal curiosity about people, and an attitude of rather critical attention to my father’s activities. Moreover, we understood each other, and she allowed me to see that in several directions she depended on me; an attitude that is always flattering, and ministers to the self-respect of the young. Her greatest pleasure now was to bring young relatives together, or put them in touch with other cousins, connections, or friends. The last surviving member of her generation, she held all the strings of family relationships in her hands. Once, I remember, when I was asking her some questions about a cousin with whom I was not acquainted, she said, suddenly, with a kind of wistfulness, “Really, I believe soon I shall be the only person left who remembers anything!”

When in London, and not on duty, I would repair every Sunday afternoon to her house in Egerton Crescent, off the Brompton Road, for tea. Usually I would arrive rather early, and sometimes in the summer I would find her and her dear old friend, Miss Anne Hutchinson, with hair spun of the finest white silk, both dressed in black, walking in the garden of the Crescent, which, with its trees, trim grass, and green-painted tubs filled with red geraniums, still appeared to retain something of the peace of the 3330 or so Sundays of the Victorian reign. The hooting of motors, the rumble of buses, seemed far away as these two Victorian ladies paced slowly up and down in the rich, smoke-laden Sunday sunlight. Or, again, in the autumn, I would discover them already in the drawing room, where the flickering tongues of the fire caught the surfaces of hundreds of small objects, all clean, polished, and bright, shining on walls and tables.

Many incidents that occurred in my aunt’s drawing room return to my mind — one, in particular, which retains its own germ of farcical fun. My brother, my sister, and I were all having tea there one Sunday afternoon; Edith was sitting in an old-fashioned armchair, the loose cover for which happened to be lying near-by on a chair against the wall. Suddenly we heard the front doorbell ring, and then the voice, well known to us, of an old friend of my parents. She was very kind, but such a great bore that my sister had already pleaded illness as an excuse for not seeing the old lady that very day at luncheon. Now here she was! And my sister appealed to my brother and me to rescue her in some way.

What was to be done? Footsteps were already on the stairs. Telling my sister to sit absolutely still, we seized the loose cover, which fortunately proved to be very loose, fitted it over her and the chair, and carried it — and her — out of the room in triumph. Only just in time; for we passed the new arrival outside the door, and explained to her that we would be back in a moment, but that one leg of the chair was unsteady, and that my aunt had just asked us to put it away downstairs, in case she forgot, and allowed someone to sit in it. So we smuggled Edith downstairs, and quietly to the front door, ourselves returning to continue our tea with a distracted aunt. But she always entered into the spirit of any situation, and did not combat our prejudices. No doubt she harbored a good many of her own.

A connection of ours to whom my aunt introduced my sister and me at this time was Lady Colvin, the wife of Sir Sidney, for many years Keeper of the Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. Sir Sidney, the author and editor of many publications, had been Robert Louis Stevenson’s most faithful and intimate friend. Lady Colvin had, before she married Sir Sidney, been the widow of my grandfather’s second cousin, a clergyman, and the younger son of Frank Sitwell of Barmoor Castle. In spite of the cloth he wore, he had prov ed a most unsatisfactory husband, and my Aunt Blanche, who had remained friends with Mrs. Sitwell when she had left him, had greatly admired her for the courage and uncomplaining dignity with which she had behaved in days when the position, according to English law, of a wife was still particularly cruel, and even her own money became the inalienable property of the husband. Moreover, Fanny, as her friends called her, had, in the first place, introduced Stevenson to Colvin, and she could therefore in a sense claim to have discovered him. And if Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters to her second husband form the most sustained collection of his correspondence, extending, as it does, over a period of more than twenty years, yet there can be no doubt, equally, that it was in the early years his finest letters were written, and written to her.

Now, some forty years later, the former Mrs. Sitwell — as during Stevenson’s life she had remained — had become Lady Colvin, an old lady, with a fine aquiline profile and white hair. Ladies of her generation as a rule employed no make-up, but Lady Colvin was heavily rouged in the artificial and conventional manner of the French eighteenth century, and this accorded well with her appearance, which possessed sufficient distinction to allow itself such frivolities. An almost professional diviner of literary talent, she had been the friend of many other writers besides Stevenson — and the enemy of several others. Wilde, for example, had described her as “a parrot with a tongue of zinc" an epigram that had gone the rounds for a whole dreary decade, and still sounds witty and significant until you ring it on the counter.

Lady Colvin I used to see at every concert and first night to which I went, and she was invariably accompanied by the rotund and polished form of Sir Claude Phillips. During the intervals, he would remain in the stalls, to talk to her, while she continually fluttered a fan, at the graceful manipulation of which she was a mistress. Few of her contemporaries, versed though they were in this aid to fascination — indeed, this art — rivaled her in it; only Lady Brougham, and in a setting very different, excelled her.

My sister was a more frequent visitor to the Colvins than was I, but I used also to go to their house, and they were most kind to both of us. Theirs was the first salon in which I set foot, and I recall, rather mistily over the gap of thirty years, the pink glow of the drawing room in Palace Gardens Terrace; Sir Sidney, sitting with his back to the window, with, outlined against it, his head at the particular downward angle at which he held it, the edges of his beard blurred by the light; Lady Colvin, armed with her fan, reclining on a sofa; and general talk, witty and interesting, and not, as in most houses of the time, about politics — for political controversies were then beginning to rage — but about pictures and books.

2

I HAVE always preferred private houses to restaurants, and conversation to shouting. Mrs. Asquith, afterwards Countess of Oxford and Asquith, by nature no less than by habit ever hospitable, used to invite me to Downing Street, then a center of such an abundance and intensity of life as it had not seen for a hundred years and is never likely to see again: for at that time it contained a social dynamo as hostess. Alas, her example, and the influence it exercised on politics, were sufficient to enjoin, for the future, carefulness, and to exalt a contrary model, of primness, smugness, sealed lips, and Punch humor. Mrs. Asquith’s audacious comments, those called forth from a witty and original mind, were governed, in spite of their apparent sharpness, by invariable standards— though standards not of taste, but of truth.

In the first place it must be borne in mind that she was an extremely religious woman. It has been related, for example, that at the time of the Armistice in November, 1918, she went down on her knees in a crowded omnibus, to say a prayer. If this be true, it will have been a genuine demonstration of feeling, for she lacked all self-consciousness or pretense. She got on well with the simple; the silly and the flighty, the greedy and the mean, were her quarry; but even the barbs she directed verbally against these, though outspoken, were ruled by the strictest Scottish moral sense. In art and life, she was always on the right side.

In Downing Street, as indeed in every house over which she presided, she was superb. She knew how to make the interior of a house lovely, and always imparted to it a particular atmosphere, impossible to mistake, so that entering it, you would at once have recognized whose home it was. Her conversation was inspiring: in the common phrase, she spoke her mind; or at any rate with the utmost rapidity she thought of things she would like to say, and said them. Nor was she in the least troubled by that bugbear of the polite, where to speak them. (One must not be rude in one’s own house, or in anyone else’s, and I remember my father adding another prohibition to the list by remarking to me once, with a glance severe and reproachful, “I’m surprised! Rude to me in my own motorcar!”)

But Mrs. Asquith would say what came into her head — often difficult to couch in civil language — in her own house, in your house, in the house of a friend, in the streets, in church, in shops, in theaters, in motorcars and in buses. For example, when she came to stay with me in Scarborough a few years later, meeting my father for the first time, she glanced at him critically and, pressing my arm, remarked in a sympathetic, hissing, and overaudible whisper: “Oh, Osbert, what a look in the eye! Cold as ice! But if you want help, let me know, and I’ll talk to him!” And of dinner parties in her own house, it was remarked that there was no one present who did not leave the dining room a better man or woman than he or she had entered it — the guests, their souls purged by pity and by terror, because of what their hostess had said to them; the hostess, for what she had said to the guests.

Her kindness — active, as opposed to the negative quality that often passes for it — was as frequent and touching as her faults were obvious. She was even more generous than extravagant, even more kind than sharp. She loved the young, revered the old, but had little patience with those in middle life, of middling mind or character. Yet, in spite of her experience of the world, she remained naïve, shrewd, uneducated, though to a degree well-read and versed in humanity; a child of brilliant perspicacity, wandering through the world, saying exactly what she thought and felt, telling others, too, what they ought to feel and think, in language that by its vivid inspiration, its gift of the art of summary, could lay a drawing room waste. She spoke, in those tones so personally stressed, before she had time to regret it: as when, on one occasion taken to see the Corot-esque work of a young painter who dabbled in willow trees and silver sunrises, all caught in mist, she pronounced before she could choke back her judgment, “A mouse’s sneeze”; a remark which would somehow reduce the afflatus of any artist.

For many years, Mrs. Asquith slept badly and, waking early in the morning, would write a collection of penciled notes to her friends (how well, on reading this, they wall recall the angular handwriting on the ycllow-white envelope!) about various topics that had caught her attention or were occupying her mind. These would be headed 4.80 A.M. or 5.00 A.M., and would usually run to some pages. I have still in my possession one of them — though this time, quite short — which she sent me in later years. She had been annoyed by the judgment Mrs. Woodrow Wilson had passed on her in a recent book, and had telephoned one evening to ask me urgently to come round the following morning at 12.15 to have half an hour’s consultation with her. Accordingly, the next day, I arrived at 44 Bedford Square at the hour indicated. Lady Oxford was expected down in a moment, and meanwhile the butler handed me a letter. The envelope was unfastened: on the outside were instructions to the butler.

WHITMORE

Give this letter to Mr. O. Sitwell before he comes into the library at 12.30 today.

Taking out the contents, I found two single sheets written in pencil, and glancing first, as often I do, at the signature, was surprised, because the handwriting was so pleasantly different from my own, to find it signed with my own name! It was dated “5 A.M. the 22nd Sept: ‘37,” and ran: —

DEAREST OSBERT
To save you the trouble of reading the lies written about me by Mrs. Woodrow Wilson (in a book you will never read) I would like you to write a letter to The Times or the Daily Telegraph, to say that your attention has been drawn to a paragraph in a book . . . lately published by Putnam. That you have been a friend of mine all your life, and resent what she has written, and even doubt whether it is accurate. You can add “Lady Oxford has never spoken ill of anyone, and though she has known many members of the Royal Family, she is not a snob: nor is she as vulgar as Mrs. Woodrow Wilson portrays her.
“Yours, etc.
“OSBERT SITWELL”

All this, Lady Oxford thought was the truth. It was certainly correct to say she was not a snob (indeed, the fact that when Mr. Asquith was Prime Minister, twenty years before, she used occasionally at The Wharf to insist on the butler taking part in charades in the drawing room, in order to impersonate the more ponderous members of the Cabinet — roles for which he showed an undoubted flair — a fact that earned much censure, was, in a way, proof of it). But it was more difficult, I thought, to declare so roundly that she had never spoken ill of anyone: it would have been accurate, I believe, to have said that she had never made an unkind remark for t he sake of its unkindness.

I spent the half hour that ensued after she appeared, therefore, in trying to convince her of that of which others, when 1 am angry, have so often tried to persuade me: that such statements as those of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson carry no weight, and that to write a letter to the press in refutation of them will only serve to call attention to the words and opinions to which you are objecting. But I do not know that, in a part so new to me, I was altogether successful.

3

I RECEIVED also a great deal of kindness from Lady Brougham and her family. She was older than Lady Oxford, belonged indeed to a previous generation and to an opposite school. Earlier I mentioned her as outshining even Lady Colvin in the art of fan manipulation, and she was certainly the most vivacious wielder of that instrument that it was ever my good fortune to meet. She fanned herself with an inimitable allurement, born of restlessness, and perhaps of a certain shyness of disposition, though this was the last quality one would have suspected in so accomplished, so finished a product of her age. More than that, she was an old lady of real beauty and of infinite charm, carrying with her, right through her old age to the day of her death, not only her winning air but the looks for which she had been famous.

In days when private life was an art, she raised it even higher in the scale, and, as an old lady, her life was largely spent in her own house, for, apart from driving about in a brougham — to the use of which vehicle, named after the first Lord Brougham, she still adhered solely — she seldom went out in London. And no wonder! For everything in her house was beautifully ordered, maintained, and arranged, and even when not exactly beautiful, formed part, as it were, of an engrossing work of art: full of character, even down to the huge eighteenthcentury volume of colored engravings of flowers which stood propped open on an eighteenth-century chair, on the landing at the top of the stairs, as if to refresh you after the climb. These plates showed Strelitzia and other exotic blossoms, and nearly every day were different, the book being changed, or opened at a different page.

In the seventies, Lady Brougham had been one of the first of her generation to take an interest in furniture and decoration, and her large mansion in Chesham Place, though naturally in the idiom of her day, and not in that of ours, manifested an impeccable and individual style, just as did her personal adornments: the diminutive piece of lace she wore on the top of her head, like a small cap, her earrings, and lace and black silk dress. There was something about her of the freshness of a vivid-hued carnation, even in old age. She remained debonair and jaunty, and though she must have had cares and sorrows of her own, appeared more interested in the worries of other people.

It was the greatest pleasure to see her, to talk to her, to have luncheon with her — even the food was unlike, and better than, that elsewhere — or to sit for a few minutes talking to her at tea, in her room, so imbued with individuality, with its chairs covered in chintz of a narrow red and white stripe, and its flowers, that were never to be seen in other houses, huge arching sprays of green Cymbidium with scarlet centers, or the coralline shields of the Anthurium. She owned many lovely pieces of furniture, inherited from her father, who had been one of the celebrated connoisseurs residing in Florence in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

But these objects could constitute a source of embarrassment as well as of delight to her guests, because she possessed, too, a standard of generosity that was innate in her, but completely her own. If someone admired, let us say, an Italian tortoiseshell cabinet of the seventeenth century, she would cry with the impetuosity that she had plainly preserved from her youth, but combined with an odd humility, a genuine surprise that you should like anything belonging to her, “Do you really think it pretty? — You must have it!” This sounded merely one of the phrases that some people use; but in her mouth these words were sincere and later acquired reality: for, as likely as not, by the time the visitor returned home in the evening, he would find it waiting for him in the hall.

Further, just as she could infuse gayety into other people by her presence, so, too, she could be witty, witty as a rule in a self-depreciating way, for though sure of herself, she thought nothing of her attainments or qualities; and this gave an added point to the things she said, which, for their value, depended usually on two things — her unfailing shrewdness of judgment, and her use of the appropriate but unexpected adjective. In illustration of this aptitude, I was told by a friend that when King Edward VII went to stay at Brougham, he arrived in a mood that rendered him difficult to please. Plainly something had gone wrong. At dinner, the King was still silent, so Lady Brougham began to talk, asking: —

“Did you notice, Sir, the soap in Your Majesty’s bathroom?”

“No!”

“I thought you might, Sir. It has such an amorous lather!”

After that, the King’s geniality returned.

4

MY Aunt Londesborough, on the other hand, though only some fifteen years younger than Lady Brougham, offered, in appearance, manner, and in her houses, as distinctive an epitome of the Edwardian Age, even though some of the Victorian tenets still survived in her: as, for example, that of being kind to the young people of the family, for whose benefit or advancement, as she saw it, she would take a rather nebulous infinity of trouble. She had now disposed of St. Dunstan’s, and was established in a marble-lined mansion in Green Street: where, though the background was a little more confined, the same lavishness and air of splendor as formerly still marked the numerous parties she gave. She had not long returned from the Durbar, laden w ith large presentation portraits of jeweled and dusky potentates, which, in spite of their color, resembled white elephants in size and usefulness, and were discreetly hung in the country. She had also brought back with her an Indian boy, Bimbi, and w hen she gave a dance, he would stand, in his native robes and high pink turban, on one of the landings of the marble staircase, directing the guests in the manner of an eighteenth-century page.

Here, too, as at Mrs. Asquith’s, you met many foreigners, albeit of a different kind, not foreign diplomats, politicians, artists, or musicians, but Hungarians and Austrians of the hunting sort. In addition, there was always a solid mass of relatives: among them my cousin, the Duchess of Beaufort, and her two daughters, Blanche and Diana Somerset: gay and delightful girls, full of zest, with an ability to instill amusement and liveliness into their surroundings, into all they touched — into the hunting field itself, I suppose, for I believe they were always eager, even when in London, to return to Badminton, and to resume a life spent largely in the saddle; anxious, however much they might be enjoying themselves, for the autumn to bring back cubbing, and for the winter to allow them whole months pursuing the fox.

With a tolerance that, as I had learned when attached to the cavalry regiment at Aldershot, not all those who seem to have been born on horseback can show, they teased me, in their warm, luxuriant voices, so typical of their family, and laughed at me, but did not in the least mind my being interested in other things.

With the sumptuousness of the entertainments at my Aunt Londesborough’s and at Mrs. Keppel’s I could contrast the archiepiscopal austerities of Lambeth, with its cohorts of curates devouring the modern equivalent of locusts and wild honey. (But even the wild honey would have proved, I apprehend, to be tame.) After dinner, at 10.15 or 10.30 in the evening, many guests repaired to the Chapel, which had been so hideously frescoed in the time of my Tait relative. I remember with what relief — for the company of the clergy sometimes intimidates me, who am frightened by no other men — I used to ask for a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Alhambra, where I arrived just in time to hear the last half hour of a revue, entitled, if I remember rightly, Swat That Fly! And there I would meet all my friends from the Brigade, admiring the serried ranks of beauties on the stage, the curls and legs and eyes in line.

I recollect very clearly the first occasion, too, on which I accompanied my sister to dine at Lambeth. It was an immense dinner party, and as we were leaving, the hall was full of fellow guests waiting for vehicles to take them away. The butler had on this occasion with great trouble procured us a taxi, and I can see now my sister’s expression of anguish, when, in the press, wishing to reward him, I inadvertently clamped half a crown instead into the inexpectant palm of Mr. Laurence Binyon, who, like us, was waiting for a cab. He remained for some moments, holding it in his hand, with a rapt gaze: and I always considered it most generous of him in after years never to mention the incident to me.

5

OF MORE recent friends, and with a very different personality, there was Lady Sackville, certainly one of the remarkable characters of the period. From time to time, I would go to dine with her alone. I would find her, before dinner, sitting in the Persian Room; a small paneled room that, though inappropriate for England, was not without a certain fitness for her, because the arabesques, and small tightly painted roses and cypresses blazoned on the walls recalled Granada, and Andalusia, and thus the strain in her own blood from which sprang the particular strange quality she possessed.

She was now middle-aged and fat, but the lines of her face were pretty with an almost classical prettiness, and her expression could be extremely seductive. The long, hollow, hooded upper lids that so clearly mark those of Sackville descent, and as a rule show beneath them eyes of a somber melancholy, in her case displayed eyes, rather prominent, of a living, changing but rather shallower fire, for to all her gifts she had given a material direction. Peasant and aristocrat, she combined many curious and conflicting traits, lived in magnificence and could live in squalor, was capable of creating both, was the slave of beautiful things, and yet must always change her surroundings, however splendid they might be.

The decoration of her houses mirrored her personality; yet the ancestral cave in the Albaicin was to be detected in it, no less than the ancestral palace. The large windows, full of objects in colored glass, gave a living warmth to the rooms; the rugs, the tortoise-shell and lapis furniture, all imparted an air of luxury and of invention. Indeed, Lady Sackville lived in a world almost entirely imaginary. She never told one the same story twice; for, to her, truth was relative and depended on how she felt when she was talking: and while the tales often retained the same features, in each new version these would be rearranged, albeit with a surprising ease, grasp, and power of conviction. But there was nothing petty about her: she was capable of acts of imaginative kindness and of cruelty, she was clever and cunning and silly and brave and timid and avaricious, extravagant and most generous, possessed the best taste and the worst, and was, in all, one of the most vivid personalities I have ever met. And I am sure that she never afforded her friends, still less those nearest to her, a dull moment; the opposition in her character of aristocrat and Spanish dancer, gypsy and woman of taste, was too pronounced to allow of it.

Occasionally, I would be taken to supper, too, at All Souls’ Place — that piazza consisting of one house behind All Souls’ Church in Langham Place — by Felicity Tree and by her sister Iris, who was then very young, but possessed a honey-colored beauty of hair and skin that I have never observed in anyone else. Viola Tree, and her husband, Alan Parsons, would often be there as well, Viola contributing her own particular vein of warmhearted vagueness and humor, and her spontaneous and inexhaustible gift of mimicry; while, singly or together, Sir Herbert and Lady Tree could be depended upon to supply an entertainment of the most delicious personal fantasy, based on the flimsiest and most delicate foundation of sense.

Though I, with the rest of the world, have seen quoted and heard repeated so many of Sir Herbert’s remarks and exploits — as when, for example, he went to a post office and asked for a penny stamp, and on being given one demanded, “Have you no others?” and, after a sheet of them had been produced, considered it exhaustively, head by head, and then, selecting a stamp in the very middle, pointed at it, and remarked with decision, “I will take that one”; and though, equally, I have read, heard, or been told of many of Lady Tree’s epigrams in one place and another, such as when, being offered two kinds of fish at a dinner party, she remarked, “Ye cannot serve both Cod and Salmon,” or when — another ichthyophagous bon mot — on a similar occasion haddock was handed to her, and she exclaimed joyously, “Buy ‘Haddock,’ and let slip the dogs of war,” yet nothing can do justice to the captivating absurdity with which they both invested everyday life. Moreover, just as Sir Herbert’s eminence on the stage a little overshadowed the exquisite virtuosity of Lady Tree’s acting, so, erudite in many subjects as she was — in an earlier age she would have been a celebrated bluestocking — not enough attention has been paid to her talk. By her dazzling mastery of the pun, in some mouths so lumpish an accomplishment, she showed her great feeling for words, and the delight to be extracted from them. Wit, indeed, veined the whole substance of Lady Tree’s life, and even during her last illness, at most a day or two before she died, when, realizing her extremity, she sent for her lawyer, in order to sign her will or add a codicil, she observed to those round her, when his name was announced, “My darlings, here comes my solicitor, to teach me my Death Duties.”

6

AND this perhaps is the place to write of Lady Diana Manners, whose beauty and personality placed her alone in the English scene: the only beauty whose looks entitled her to be discussed by those who remembered the celebrated beauties of former days, the Comtesse de Castiglione and Georgina Lady Dudley, debating whether she should have been half an inch taller or shorter; in fact the only classic of her kind and generation. For this was not the era of the classic beauty: never before had the ugly woman enjoyed such a run for her ugliness as in these days, and after the war, the uglier, the more “amusing” her appearance was deemed to be; so that the great beauty, traditional in line, stood almost at a disadvantage. But fortunately for Lady Diana, though her looks belonged to all the English generations before her own, her spirit was essentially of the time, audacious, enterprising, and critical. I have heard it said about her — and about whom else could it justly be said? — that when she enters a room, it seems to grow lighter; and her eyes certainly hold an unusual refulgence, blue and gray.

The first time I dined at Lady Cunard’s house in Cavendish Square, I sat next to Diana, and I remember her telling me in later years of her surprise at meeting a young officer of the Brigade of Guards who insisted on talking of Stravinsky.

There are many others, many, whom I should write about thus, but to the law of selection that governs the art of the writer I owe a higher allegiance, and in consequence, I must ask my friends of this period of my novitiate in life to forgive me for my omissions.

As if to make this life complete for me, I now fell in love for the first time since I had grown up. And 1 his, the atmosphere of it, tinges all those years for me, and unites the various backgrounds with the same thread of gold. Under a staircase, at a dance — my liking for dancing had become a passion — I saw a young girl sitting, talking to her partner with a curious, distant, wide-eyed solemnity, and the impression of her small golden head and small, childlike, rather expressionless face — eyes that were like a gap because of their light color, but full of appraisal and meaning — and of her long, slender neck, and long, delicate figure, as first I thus saw her, was with me for many years, so that, whenever I scribbled on a piece of paper without thinking, it was her face that, however clumsily, I drew. (Indeed, I recall my surprise when one day I was scribbling and my companion — it was in the trenches — saw what I had drawn, recognized the likeness, and said, “I know who that is!”) As I had passed, her glance had rested on me —• or so I like to think — and when we met, later that evening, we soon became friends. I was, indeed, fortunate that in the next few years she chose to give me so much of her time and company.

Though two years younger than myself — she was barely eighteen — she was not only extremely original in her point of view, but already most decided in character. She found herself as naturally at home in the modern world as I did: while, unlike me, she had enjoyed, and been clever enough to take advantage of, a superb education of the traditional kind. She accepted no ready-made way of thinking or feeling, was naturally a rebel — and, who can say, even perhaps, in spite of her love of pleasure, a saint — in her heart: and she possessed a natural comprehension of the esthetic standards of the day.

In no other period would young people have been allowed to see so much of each other, without interference by their elders. She and I, and a band of friends of the same age, used always to go about together, forming our own nucleus at every party. Besides frequenting the ballrooms of the rich, we would find our own amusements, going to dance at the White City or Earl’s Court, visiting suburban music halls, theaters in the East End, and a music hall in Whitechapel where all the turns were fresh — if the term fresh can be used about them — from Cernăuti, and spoke only Yiddish. Thus we became lost in the strange proletarian cosmopolis of the twentieth century, the inexorable pattern of the future. Many miles of City, East End, and suburb we traversed in our walks at night.

For the following five years, I saw her, except when I was staying with my family or abroad, almost every day. I grew to know her every look, every way of expressing herself, every aspect of her character. To her, companion of my youth, I owe an inestimable amount of happiness and sorrow, of joy and regret.

(To be continued)