I have a great favour to ask you—but as I believe and think you can grant it—I shall ask: Lieutenant —— of your Royal Navy—whom we got to like very much two years ago at Sorrento—is willing to come this automn and spend a month with us at our country place—if he gets leaves of course; I write all this to you as I don’t know who else can help and give him leave.
We should like to have him about the middle of your September (the very beginning of ours). If you think he can get leave just then would you kindly telegraph to me—then I could write and ask him (I suppose he will be at Cowes?). Today is my namesday, and having received any amounts of presents—we are going to Church—as one always does—on such occasions and then there will be a rather big lunch and the band will play—All this glorious occasion is not only for me—but also for my niece Olga.
My sister Xenia—who does not know you—says she is sorry not to have that honour and pleasure!
My husband sends his best love (or whatever one says). Goodbye dear Admiral. I wish I was going to see you soon it would be awfully amusing. Write to me later on when you will be free please!
Much love and good wishes.
Olga.
P.S. Mrs. Francklin sends lots of kind messages and love. Mama sends her best love too.
That visit of King Edward to Russia was really quite remarkable for the really eloquent speech the King made, without a note of any sort. I said to him at breakfast the next morning, when they brought in a copy of what they thought he had said, that I wondered on such a momentous occasion he didn’t have it written out. “Well!” he said to me, “I did try that once, when the French President Loubet came to visit me, and I learnt the speech off by heart in the garden of Buckingham Palace. When I got up to say it, I could not remember it, and had to keep on beginning again at the beginning. So I said to myself, ‘Never again’!” And I must say I share his conviction that there is no such eloquence as when out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. Emotion and earnestness will do much more than move mountains; they will move multitudes—and that was what King Edward was able to do.
I have spoken elsewhere of what I deemed was a suitable epitaph for him—those great words of Pascal: “le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” The heart has reasons that the mind knows nothing about.
God bless him!