The ex-Crown Princess of Saxony, for instance, was a most ingenuous person, who would have written a chapter, had Miss Craven permitted her, on “why the royal honeymoon bored her to tears,” and much more that would have caused endless scandal and heartburnings to the Saxon court.
“Our Louise,” as she was termed by her subjects, had a positive mania for cleanliness, and she told Miss Craven that once when she was travelling with her mother the water supply gave out and she was in despair how to wash her hands. But necessity originated a brilliant idea, and at the next stop Louise rushed to the buffet, and returned with a waiter staggering under many bottles of mineral water, with which she performed her ablutions. “Surely,” remarked the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, “there is no accounting for your vagaries, Louise!”
Miss Craven asked the Princess what she most desired to do when the dullness of palace life obsessed her. “To post a letter in a pillar-box like any one else,” was the reply. Once, coming from the Continent, she overheard some fellow-passengers discussing her rather freely, and entering into the spirit of the adventure, Louise joined in the conversation, and for once saw herself as others saw her. “Well,” said she, as the train slowed into Charing Cross, “you’ve had an opportunity of meeting that terrible woman—I am the ex-Crown Princess,” and when the horror-stricken occupants of the compartment saw her name upon her small luggage, they realised that the pretty, vivacious, fair woman was none other than the former wife of the King of Saxony.
Lady Cardigan (whose recollections “Labby” described as a classic) disliked the blue pencil, for she saw no reason why you should not say what you like in a book. She was a most brilliant anecdotist, and Miss Craven said she could tell good stories for a fortnight without repeating herself. One, which related to a well-known Bacchanalian member of the aristocracy, is worth recalling. The gentleman in question once kissed a pretty housemaid, who made a decidedly original protest. “I wonder, my Lord,” said the girl, “that a nobleman like you don’t drink champagne. Brandy do colour your breath.”
Lady Cardigan held the opinion that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. “Men fall in love with ballet-girls, barmaids and servants,” she once remarked, “so why shouldn’t women fall in love with men of inferior station if it amuses them?”
Maude Craven could tell of flutterings in the dove-cotes of Mayfair, and of many skeletons in ancestral cupboards whose bones must have rattled in dread of what Lady Cardigan’s marvellous memory could have recalled about them.
The lady who followed Miss Craven had only been with us for a short time when the doctors told her that she could not live in England. She went to California and got married. Miss Marie Ivory, who followed her, married a famous artist.
Miss Ethel Phipps, the next, was with us for several years, and accompanied us to Italy and Sicily, and inaugurated the system of tissue-paper scrap-books, which I have found so useful in collecting the materials for my books of travel. And she was an excellent typist, the first excellent typist we had had, though I took up the use of the typewriter quite early. The first I ever had was a Remington which I bought in 1883 in Sydney from a man named Cunningham who reported law cases for the Sydney Morning Herald. He sold it to me for half the price he had given for it (I paid him about fifteen pounds, I think), because the judges would not look at his notes when they were in typewriting. He had bought the instrument under the idea that the extra legibility would be received with acclaim. The judges thought that the machine might not write down what the reporter meant it to—they credited it with the powers of a planchette, which was then very fashionable.
Miss Phipps wrote a very amusing little book called Belinda and Others, which Warne bought from her and published both in England and America.
When she left us because she was needed at home, her place was taken by a very clever and interesting girl fresh from school, who has made a great name for herself in fiction—Miss Ethel May Stevens, whose pen-name is Ethel Stefana Stevens. We took her to Sicily almost directly she came to us, and Italianised her surname into the nickname Stefana, by which even her own relations grew to call her.