“The beloved Queen, though very hot and tired (she had been before to revisit her birthplace at Kensington), looked very sweet and smiling, and walked indefatigably from side to side of the long avenues of people, shaking hands with different ladies. There was the usual procession of princes and princesses, including the white-haired Duchess of Mecklenbourg and the ever-pretty group of Hesse princesses. The Princess Beatrice’s baby assisted at the party in her perambulator, pushed by a nurse in white. A good deal of my time was taken up by the Duchess of Cleveland insisting that she could have no refreshment but lemonade, and that being quite a quarter of a mile off; but I could not get it after all, through people ten deep in the refreshment tents. Some of the guests were rowed by the Queen’s boatmen in their gorgeous mediaeval costume upon the lake, with very pretty effect. The palace is very handsome on the garden side.”
“July 8, 1887.—I made rather friends at the Speaker’s with his eldest boy, Willie Peel, and walked about with him on the terrace. He is in all the first flush of people-seeing, and thinks everybody full of originality; yet how few ever say more than something they have heard or read long ago, and dug up out of some remote corner of their brain. He is, however, delightful, and being evidently ambitious, will some day be very distinguished, I should think.
“How often one wishes one could enter society again, with one’s past conversation like a white page, that where one could not say good of any one, one had always kept silence. I sympathise with General Gordon saying that one reason why he never desired to enter social life was the very great difficulty of knowing people and not discussing others.”
“July 9.—At Lambeth garden-party I sat with ——, whose marriage, an admirable one, was quelched by worldly motives on the other side, sadly, long ago. She spoke of the married happiness of her brilliant and popular namesake ‘Yes, life for her is always delightful now; but I—but I!’—‘Where do you live?’—‘I don’t live, I exist.’
“I sat at dinner by Lady C, a very singular religious ‘talker,’ who plunged at once into—‘I trust you are interested in the good work.’—‘What good work?’—‘Raising the classes,’ and so on, and so on, endless well-meant nonsense, in very grand expressions, till I longed to say to her, and did, in other words, what Madame de Sévigné said to some one, ‘Thicken me your religion a little; it is evaporating altogether by being subtilised.’ I tried to dwell upon the really higher life (for she had talked of her own neglected education), of teaching herself first as much as possible, that she might help herself to teach her young son. I suppose that, for her, would be the higher life. How much, in this generation, ‘religious people’ are apt to forget John Wyckliff’s motto, ‘He who liveth best, prayeth best.’”
“Sunday, July 10.—Sat in the afternoon in the garden at Lowther Lodge, seeing a long diorama of people drop in and have tea.
“Afterwards I ascended the great brick mansions close by to see Mrs. Procter (Barry Cornwall’s widow), who is not the least aged in mind, and apparently not in body. People thought she would be broken by her daughter’s death; but constitutions, especially of the old, seldom take any notice of heart-blows, though there is something touching in the way she speaks of her lost daughters as ‘my Edith,’ ‘my Adelaide.’ People call her ‘Our Lady of Bitterness,’ but her words have no touch of sharpness. No one is more agreeable still: no one has more boundless conversational powers: indeed, she often says of herself that ‘talking is meat, drink, and clothing’ to her. Her sense of humour is exquisite; she never speaks bad grammar herself, so she can never tolerate it in others. She wears a front of blonde cendré, and boldly speaks of it as a wig. Mr. Browning came in, and they were most amusing together. ‘My wife thought you would not perhaps like to meet Mr. Labouchere, Mrs. Procter?’ said Mr. Thompson of the Pall Mall Gazette, rather interrogatively. ‘Your wife was quite right: had I found, on coming to dine with you, that Mr. Labouchere was expected, I should have been compelled to ask you at once to call me a cab.’—‘Ah! Labby, Labby!—Hie, cabby, cabby!!’ cried Mr. Browning in the quaintest way.[456] Mr. Browning goes to see Mrs. Procter every Sunday afternoon, giving up all else for it.
“Mrs. Procter has the almost lost art of conversation in the fullest degree. Lord Houghton recollects how she was asked to meet Macaulay at one of Rogers’ breakfasts. Afterwards she said to Rogers, ‘But where was Macaulay?’—‘Why, he sat opposite to you!’—‘Was that him? Why, I always heard he was such a tremendous talker.’—‘So he is,’ said Rogers; ‘but you see I talked so much myself, I only left one opening, and that you took.’”
“July 11.—Dined with the Seymour Hughes’s, where General Higginson was full of indignation about the mismanagement of royal invitations—that it was impossible for the Lord Chamberlain to do it alone, but that he might have a committee—three or four men of the Kenneth Howard kind—who would see that the right people were asked. The Prince of Wales had said to one lady, ‘I did not see you at the garden-party,’ and she had answered, ‘No, I was not asked; but my dressmaker was.’”
“July 15.—Dined with Mrs. Portman—a very large party. She told me that, close to her country-house, a labourer had watched some boys bathing, and thought how delightful was the way in which they dived, floated, &c., and, though he could not swim, he determined that, on the very first chance, he would enjoy the same amusement. Soon after, he was sent to cut rushes with two other men. When his work was finished, he remembered his wish, and did not even wait to undress, but, pulling off his boots, jumped into the water with his clothes on. Soon he got into a hole and began to sink. He called for help, and another of the men jumped in, and was sucked into the hole also, and so the third. Mr. Fitzhardinge Portman came up when it was all over, and said, ‘I will ride on and break it to Mrs. W.,’ the wife of one of the men. As he reached the cottage, Mrs. W. came out to meet him and said, ‘I know what you have come to tell me, sir. Poor W. is dead.’—‘How can you know it?’—‘Why, sir, just now my little girl came running in all awestruck, and said that she had met a figure all in white in the wood-path down which she always ran to meet her father; and then I knew it was a warning.’