There lay the blue plush seat on the ground, and under it, his top-hat squashed flat.
What a furore that play made, and yet there was little or nothing in it. But success came from the fact that it struck the right note, and struck it at the moment when the nation was ready for the awakening. How it was boomed! Men rushed to join the Territorials, and even I was one of the first women to send in my name for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps. But, as they asked me to go to a riding-school to learn to ride—I, who had ridden all my life—I really could not go further in the matter.
Mr. Fielding is a most interesting personality and character.
“We are so apt to forget the good things of life,” he said that evening. “I wanted a motor-bus just now. There was none at the corner, and I had to walk. I felt annoyed. Then I pulled myself up, and thought—How many dozen times have I caught this bus just at the moment I wanted it! Did I ever feel or express gratitude? Yet when I miss it I growl—now is this fair?—and I shook myself and felt ashamed.”
“Very noble of you,” I said.
“Not at all. But I am always saying to myself I have no right to grumble, no right to be annoyed while I omit to be thankful and grateful for the manifold blessings around me.”
Speaking of nervousness being the cause of my refusal to go to Leeds that week to address five thousand people, Mr. Fielding laughed.
“How I sympathise with you! For twenty years I have been before the public, and yet have never made a speech without a little twinge.”
Of his chief, Laurier, he remarked: “It is an astonishing thing how much more English than French he has become. Forty years of constant communication with, and work amongst, British-speaking people has moulded him along British lines, and although the French manner and charm remain, British determination, doggedness, clear sight, and broad views are dominant. In fact, I far more often find him reading an English book than a French one, when I enter his library.”
Then briefly touching on his own doings: