“There was a beautiful ball at Lowther Lodge—the Princess Christian there and the garden illuminated, and looking, in that dress, as big as the Green Park. I sat out with Lady Strathmore, full of all the discomforts of a great inheritance—such endless details to be filled up: such endless new responsibilities; and just what seems the wrong things always left away.
“I heard such a charming story of little Jane Smith the other day. Her nurse told her to say her prayers. She wouldn’t; she said God wouldn’t expect her to. ‘But He always expects it,’ said the nurse. ‘No, He doesn’t,’ replied little Jane, ‘for I told Him the other day I couldn’t say them, I was so sleepy, and He said, ‘Don’t mention it, Miss Smith.’”
“July 15.—Rain on St. Swithin’s Day. Lady Lyndhurst says, ‘Do you know that he was three times Lord Chancellor of England, and that the only man who has filled that office three times since was my lord.’
“Went to see Mrs. Ross,[457] a breeze from Castagnuolo in London. She was full of the enchantment of a visit to Lacaita at Leucaspide, and of a tour she had made to Otranto; to Lecce, where all the professors had met to receive ‘una donna molta istruita’ at the museum, where she had not known anything whatever of the subjects they discoursed upon, but, by judicious silence and an occasional ‘si,’ had now the highest opinions; to Manfredonia, where the inn is now kept by one Don Michele, to whom the would-be sojourners have to be formally presented, when he accepts or rejects them, with ‘mi piace’ or ‘non mi piace.’ On one of these excursions she heard the sound of an instrument hitherto unknown to her from a hollow below the road, and going down, found a boy playing on a long pipe of birch-bark. ‘Cosa è questo?’—‘Il fischio della primavera;’ and she bought it for ten centimes—the sweetest of music and of instruments; but it only lasts a week, and can only be obtained with the spring.
“Afterwards I sat with Miss Seymour, who talked of the political state of France, and of Kisseloff saying, ‘Ils se croient toujours malades quand ils n’ont pas la fièvre.’
“Then to Mrs. Liddell (of Christ-Church). Princess Christian had just been there for a committee for women’s work. Mrs. Liddell said she went about immensely amongst the poor of Windsor, and had a district. Once, when she went for a month to Berlin, she said to one of her poor women that she was going away, but that she would be well looked after, as she had got some one to take her place. ‘Yes, but it will not be the same to me; for I shall have no one to tell my troubles to.’
“Mrs. Liddell had some capital oil-portraits. She asked who I thought they were by. I supposed by young Richmond. ‘No; by my daughter Violet.’”
“July 16.—Luncheon with Lady Knightley and then to Osterley—a soft warm day; the flowers, from the long drought, quite magnificent under the dark cedars by the lake.
‘Look how the roses
Hold up their noses,’
said old Lord Ebury, with whom I walked about, and who begged Miss Grosvenor not to leave him till she had found him an innamorata; which she eventually did in the person of Lady Balfour of Burleigh, very pretty in her attentions to the old man. Then the Duchess of Mecklenbourg came, and also sat under the trees. Lady Wynford brought Mr. Graham Vivian and me home, and I went to a Cinderella ball at Lady Guinness’s—quite splendid; and though it began at ten and ended at twelve, very crowded and successful, showing that the introduction of an earlier hour for balls would be perfectly easy.”