While we are familiar with that phase of international marriage which confers rank and title upon the daughters of our republic, no American woman has ever played such a part in the British empire as has fallen to the lot of Lady Curzon. From that day in the spring of 1895, when she became the wife of the young Commoner, George Nathaniel Curzon, she stepped into English history; the days of her American belleship became a fragrant reminiscence. The qualities which had given them brilliancy, however, continued to illuminate the broader horizon of her life in England, and have become in her present exalted position the admiration of her own country, whose interest in her is purely personal, and the gratification of England, whose interest is political and much farther-reaching.
To the vast majority of people, who have but a superficial knowledge of Lady Curzon, her charm lies in the phases of that exterior life which are visible to all and easily discerned from afar,—her youth, her beauty, her wealth, the artistic perfection of her raiment, and the glory and pageant of her present existence. These, however, are but foot-lights to the real power of the woman rising beyond them.
As a girl in America she stood forth against the rich background of her home as distinctly as she is silhouetted to-day against the magnificence of the throne of India. It was not so much what she did or said, though that was sometimes of an unusual order, that made her the social power she was in America; it was rather what people instinctively felt that she was. "What thou art," says Emerson, defining that force we call character, "so roars and thunders above thy head, I cannot hear thee speak." She was serious and earnest rather than scintillating, with a reserve and dignity of manner tempered by a sweetness that admitted no suggestion of austerity.
The grace with which she now meets every situation, the intelligent interest she manifests in every theme with which she is approached, are not matters of happy chance or accident. She has been carefully equipped for her place in life. Studious and ambitious, she has known little of frivolity or idleness. Every faculty and every gift with which she was endowed have been conscientiously cultivated, so that, like the wise virgins of the parable, she was found ready when the hour came with a light that guides not only her own footsteps, but is seen from afar.
Jennie Chamberlain
(Lady Naylor-Leyland)
From the painting by H. Schmiechen
Though Lady Curzon's life has been largely cosmopolitan, the city of Chicago, in which she was born and passed her first thirteen years, has a more substantial claim upon her than any in which she has since lived. She evidently reciprocates the feeling of the former city, for it was to it that she recently addressed a plea in behalf of the famine-stricken districts of India. It was there that her father, Mr. Levi Z. Leiter, amassed his immense fortune, laying its foundation as a partner in the dry-goods firm of Marshall Field & Co. There, also, her brother, Joseph Leiter, still continues his remarkable position in the stock market.
In the year 1881 Lady Curzon's family joined that ever-increasing colony at Washington that is made up of wealth and leisure. It has in recent years become a distinctive feature of the capital, its members having built there some of the handsome homes that adorn the city, and which they occupy usually for a few months each year. Their social functions are attended with much magnificence, and they have the entrée to official society, and frequently to that exclusive circle of aristocratic old families, many of whom have lived there in unostentatious elegance ever since the nation transferred its capital to the banks of the Potomac.