Among those who paid her the tribute of a profound admiration was a rising young secretary of the kingdom, a man of scholarly tastes and an author of established reputation.
"I found," recently wrote Julian Ralph from India, "a sure key to the viceroy's character in between the lines of a dozen speeches that he made in January and February, 1899. Some of his qualities, more especially his quick sympathy, humor, and the sentimental and romantic inclination, are rather more American than English.... It is consoling to us Americans to find that the man who has attracted so much beauty and talent away from our country is himself the next thing to an American."
When he met Miss Leiter, though he was but thirty-five years of age, Mr. Curzon had been a member of Parliament, representing the district of Southport, for eight years. He had already wealth and distinction, and was the heir to the title of his father, who is the fourth Baron Scarsdale. His ambition, moreover, was of that high order which found in Miss Leiter a responsive attitude and a quickening sympathy. His literary and political career—in a word, the position he had made for himself through his own talents—was to her a matter of far deeper interest than the eventual inheritance of his father's estate and title. The reputation which his writings on the political questions in the East had given him particularly attracted her admiration.
Replying four years later to the address of welcome delivered to him by the city of Bombay, Lord Curzon expressed gratification at its kindly tone both for himself and his wife, who, he said, came to India with sympathies as warm as his own, and who looked forward with earnest delight to a life of happy labor in the midst of its people.
Mattie Mitchell
(Duchesse de Rochefoucauld)
From photograph by C. M. Bell
The interest which Miss Leiter's remarkable career had inspired intensified with the announcement of her approaching marriage. Her home was besieged by newspaper correspondents representing all sections of the country, showing how widely she was known.
The 22d of April—the date selected for her wedding—was an ideal spring day. At an early hour in the morning people began to gather around St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, where the ceremony was to be performed at half-past eleven o'clock, with a hope of catching a glimpse of the fair and famous bride. By eleven o'clock the streets and sidewalks and Lafayette Square were solidly banked with spectators, and it was with difficulty that a passage-way was kept open for the carriages of those who had been invited to witness the ceremony. Women cried out that they were being crushed, and others fainted, yet the crowd continued to increase till the moment of the bride's arrival.