I will give the other side in another anecdote. A smart party. A stream of guests coming up a famous staircase. Two in a balcony looking down on the arrivals.
He: "Who is that?"
She: "I don't know."
He: "But you know everybody."
She: "Nobody knows everybody."
There spoke the voice of authority. Society in London is now so multitudinous that even a bowing acquaintance between its less conspicuous members is not universal. It was Lady Jeune's mission to bring together those who stood apart. She swept into her net many a foreigner who but for her might have remained a foreigner. I will venture to guess that Lady St. Helier's invitation was one of the few unofficial invitations which Mr. Roosevelt accepted for his brief stay in London. They met twenty years ago or more when Mr. Roosevelt was in London, and made friends. He used to make friendly inquiries about Mrs. Jeune, as Mrs. Jeune did about him, year by year, and I often carried friendly messages from each to the other. She will surround him with delightful people, among whom there will be one or two or three he had never heard of; and when he has met them will wonder he had not known them always.
Lady St. Helier has published a book of Reminiscences which I have not yet read. I am therefore borrowing a little of her courage in giving my own account of some matters which she may have dealt with, and perhaps from a different point of view. But I must take that risk. I prefer taking it. If my testimony, or anybody's testimony, is to have any value it must be from its independence.
Mrs. Jeune lived for many years in Wimpole Street; then moved to Harley Street, and then, after Lord St. Helier's death, in 1905, to Portland Place. Their place in the country was Arlington Manor, near Newbury, in Berkshire, the scene of the battle, in 1643, in which Lord Falkland, despairing of peace, says his biographer, threw his life away. There stands a monument on the battlefield erected not many years ago with an inscription by the late Lord Carnarvon, himself a kind of nineteenth-century Falkland, who threw away his political future in an impossible attempt to come to terms with Mr. Parnell, Lord Carnarvon also despairing of peace. The inscription is a piece of literature for ever.
At Arlington it was Lady Jeune's delight to gather about her some of the men and women she really liked, and who really liked her. The house was not large, and was devoid of all other splendour than such as the beauty of its position and view and park and gardens gave it. But it was the home of comfort and charm. Now it has passed into other hands and Lady St. Helier has built herself another house, known as Cold Ash. But the memories of Arlington will never pass.
Perhaps it was in Arlington that Lady Jeune's gifts as hostess were to be seen at their best. It is one thing to take charge of a dinner, another to handle a difficult team from Saturday to Monday, or often longer. Freedom of choice is a thing which has to be paid for. But to her this was no task. She had good hands, and a touch so delicate that you were guided without knowing you had a bit in your mouth. It was a skill which all depended on kindness and sympathy; and these belonged to her in overflowing measure.