Her answer was to look at him coldly and turn on her heel. Which, after all, was perhaps the wisest answer she could give.
. . . . . . . .
A kindly old man took me to his studio and began to talk of Dickens. He spoke of those Victorian days as though they were the greatest that have ever been. He knew Anthony Trollope and all his works and looked askance at me because Barchester Towers was the only Trollope book I had read.
And then he took me to an easel and showed me his latest work—a “pretty-pretty” picture of a girl in a garden; the sort of picture that, according to my mood, either excites my laughter or throws me into a fury of rage.
But Marcus Stone was very old, and his ideals, being those of yesteryear, left me untouched. The young can never understand the old and, as I listened to him talking of art and literature and life, I told myself that we to-day are centuries away from the mid-Victorian days. If he had not been so old and kindly I should have wished to say:
“Do you want to know what all you people were like fifty years ago?—well, read Punch for, say, the year 1870.”
But though my friends tell me that I am brutal, and I know I am ill-mannered, I could not find it in my heart to speak those words.
. . . . . . . .
The amiable but rather weak Mr P. W. Wilson, who used to do “Lobby” work for The Daily News, having [26] ]declined a whisky, entered into conversation with me at the hotel at Criccieth. He told me that till that morning he had been staying with Mr Lloyd George, but that, Mr Masterman, Sir Rufus Isaacs and other people of importance having turned up, he himself had had to seek refuge in the hotel.
The occasion of the assembly of these wits was the opening of an institute at Llanystumdwy, the little village near Criccieth, where the Prime Minister spent his childhood days. Mr Lloyd George had given the institute to the inhabitants of the village and was himself to open it publicly the following day.