Part 12 (1/2)
The only place I look upon as ho to ed to Mrs Hailvie, of Beale]--a house near North Berwick, in which we lived for seven years After Glen and e in Berkshi+re, Archerfield is the place I love best in the world I was both happier and more miserable there than I have ever been in my life
Just as Williaious experience, so I could write on the varieties of my moral and domestic experiences at that wonderful place If ever I were to be as unhappy again as I was there, I would fly to the shelter of those Rackhaulls shriek and dive and be ultimately healed by the beauty of the anchored seas which bear their islands like the Christ Child on their breasts
Unfortunately for me, my father had business which kept him in London He was in treaty with Lord Gerard to buy his uninteresting house in an uninteresting square The only thing that pleased ate When I could not find the key of the square and wanted to sit out witha ball early, I was in the habit of cliates in my tulle dress This was a feat which was attended by ive a proate, you would very likely be caught up by the tulle fountain of your dress, in which case you ht easily lose your life; or, if you did not keep your eye on the tiht by an early house-ht easily lose your reputation No one is a good judge of her own reputation, but I like to think that those iron gates were the silent witnesses of my milder manner
My father, however, loved Grosvenor Square and, being anxious that Laura and I should coal was ever given a warmer welcome than I hen I left the area of the Great Western Railway; but the problem of how to finish my education remained and I was deterhteen What with reading, hunting and falling in love at Easton Grey, I was not at all happy and wanted to be alone
I knew no girls and had no friends except er to talk to them about my affairs; I never could at any tiossip I had not forood letters aboutthe principal part I shrank then, as I do now, fro the secrets and sensations of life Reticence should guard the soul and only those who have cofriends, I see hardly any one with this quality For the moment my cousin Nan Tennant, Mrs Arthur Sassoon, Mrs James Rothschild, Antoine Bibesco, and my son and husband are the only people I can think of who possess it
John Morley has, in carved letters of stone upon his chimney- piece, Bacon's fine words, ”The nobler a soul, the more objects of compassion it hath”
When I first read them, I wondered where I could meet those souls and I have wondered ever since To have coht for the objects of your pity and you must feel and express tenderness towards all h you h pity for the pathos of life
My husband is a , when he and I were in Paris, where we had gone for a holiday, I found hi with his head in his hands and the newspaper on his knee
I saas deeply moved and, full of apprehension, I put my arm round hiraph in the paper and I read how some of the Eton boys had had to break the bars of their s to escape from fire and others had been burnt to death We knew neither a boy nor the parent of any boy at Eton at that time, but Henry's eyes were full of tears, and he could not speak
I had the same experience with him over the wreck of the titanic
When we read of that challenging, luxurious shi+p at bay in the ice-fields and the captain sending his unanswered signals to the stars, we could not sit through dinner
I knew no one of this kind of sympathy in my youth, and my father was too busy andI wanted to be alone and I wanted to learn After endless talks it was decided that I should go to Germany for four or five un but finishi+ng education
Looking back on this decision, I think it was a re and enius for horses and adored hunting; I had such a wonderful hack that every one collected at the Park rails when they sawinto the Row; but all this did not deflect me from my purpose and I went to Dresden alone with a stupid land, certainly in Gerht have passed as a moderate beauty
CHAPTER V
A DRESDEN LODGING HOUSE--MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE WITH AN OFFICER AFTER THE OPERA----AN ELDERLY AMERICAN ADMIRER--YELLOW ROSES, GRAF VON-- VON--AND MOTIFS FROM WAGNER
Frau von Mach kept a ginger-coloured lodging-house high up in Luttichau-strasse She was a wolish and her husband, having gone mad in the Franco-Prussian war, had left her penniless with three children
She had to work for her living and she cooked and scrubbed without a thought for herself from dawn till dark
There were thirteen pianos on our floor and two or three perers The rest of the people came and went--men, women and boys of every nationality, professionals and amateurs--but I was too busy to care or notice ent or who cao as a bachelor to Dresden, I could not have done it hter and daughter to be educated in Germany for a short time, but they were chaperoned by a woman of worth and character, who never left theoverness, who came to me when Elizabeth was four
In parenthesis, I may htful Press, wishi+ng to ht idea of turning this simple, devoted woh in his sleeve at this and openly make a stunt of it, but it had its political uses; and, after the Russians had been seen with snow on their boots by everyone in England, the gentle would be believed if it could be repeated often enough And they were right: the spiteful and the silly disseoverness fros in equal proportions to the credulous, the cowards and the cranks The greenhorns believed it and the funkers, who saw a plentiful crop of spies in every bush, found no difficulty in uishi+ng in the Tower of London--to myself, who suddenly became a tennis-champion and an habituee of the German officers' camps!