I pestered my husband with questions. What should I wear? What should I talk about? He just laughed.
The paper had reported a “levee ordered by the queen”, describing the gowns and jewels worn by the ladies.
I had little jewelry—a diamond ring, which Tom gave me before we were married, a bracelet, two brooches, and a string of gold beads, which were fashionable in America. I put them all on with my best bib and tucker. When we were dressed, Tom gave me one look and said, “Why do you wear all that junk?” I took off one of the brooches and the string of gold beads.
When our carriage drew up to the house on Grosvenor Square, liveried servants stood at each side of the door, liveried servants guided us inside. There was a gold carpet, paintings of ladies and gentlemen in gorgeous attire, and murals and tapestries in the marble halls. But I quickly forgot all of this grandeur listening to the names of guests being called off as they entered the drawing-room: Mr. Gladstone and Mrs. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery and the Marquis of Salisbury, Mrs. Humphry Ward, looking fatter and older than I had expected, officers, colonels, viscounts, and ladies, and then Tom and Mary—but they were not called off that way. I wanted to meet Mr. Gladstone, and hoped I might even be near him at dinner; but I sat between a colonel and a young captain of the Scots Greys.
Mr. Gladstone was on the other side of the table. It was a huge table, more than five feet wide and very long. My husband was somewhere out of sight at the other end. Mr. Gladstone mentioned the fund being raised for the victims of the Paris Opera Comique fire. It is good form to be silent in the presence of death, especially when death is colossal, and the English never fail to follow good form. There was a sudden lull at our end of the table.
It was I who broke that silence. I was touched by the generosity of England, and said so. Since my arrival I had daily noted that England was giving to India, sending relief to Greece and Armenia, raising a fund for the fire sufferers, and celebrating the Queen's Jubilee by feeding the poor. I addressed my look and my admiring words to Mr. Gladstone.
Either my sincerity or the embarrassment he knew would follow my disregard of “the thing that is done” moved Mr. Gladstone's sympathy. He smiled across the table at me and answered, “I am so glad you see these good points of England.” It was about the most gracious thing that was ever done to me in my life. In England it is bad form to speak across the table. One speaks to one's neighbor on the right or to one's neighbor on the left; but the line across the table is foreign soil and must not be shouted across.
That night my husband said: “I forgot to tell you. They never talk across the table in England.” I chided him, and with some cause. I had soon discovered that in England, as in America, it was not enough to be “my own natural self.” But I came to love Mr. Gladstone. Long after that I told him the story of Mrs. Grant, who, when an awkward young man had broken one of her priceless Sevres after-dinner coffee cups, dropped hers on the floor to meet him on the same level. “Any woman who, to put any one at ease, will break a priceless Sevres cup is heroic,” I said. His answer, though flippant, was pleasant: “Any man who would not smile across the table at a lovely woman is a fool.”
Mr. Gladstone always wore a flower in his button-hole, a big, loose collar that never fitted, a floppy black necktie, and trousers that needed a valet's attention. He was the greatest combination of propriety and utter disregard of conventions I had ever seen.
The event next in importance to a presentation at court was a tea at which the tea planter Sir Thomas Lipton was one of the guests. He was not Sir Thomas then, but was very much in the limelight, having contributed twenty-five thousand pounds to the fund collected by the Princess of Wales to feed the poor of London in commemoration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.