the Albert Hall, was afterwards built."

In the memoir of the second Lady Dilke, prefixed to _The Book of the
Spiritual Life_, Sir Charles writes of this time, 1859 to 1860, when he
"loved to be patronized by her, regarding her with the awe of a
hobbledehoy of sixteen or seventeen towards a beautiful girl of nineteen
or twenty." But at one point she bewildered him; for in those days Emilia
Strong was devout to the verge of fanaticism:

"We were all puzzled by the apparent conflict between the vitality and
the impish pranks of the brilliant student, expounding to us the most
heterodox of social views, and the 'bigotry' which we seemed to
discern when we touched her spiritual side." [Footnote: _Book of the
Spiritual Life_, Memoir, p. 10.]

No doubt the fastings and mortifications which Emilia Strong practised at
that period of her youth would seem 'bigotry' to a lad brought up under
influences which, in so far as theology entered into them, had an
Evangelical bent. Charles Dilke thus summed up his early prepossessions
and practices in this respect:

'My mother had been a strong Low Church woman, and those of her
letters which I have destroyed very clearly show that her chief fear
in meeting death was that she would leave me without that class of
religious training which she thought essential. My grandfather and my
father, although both of them in their way religious men (and my
grandfather, a man of the highest feeling of duty), were neither of
them churchgoers, nor of her school of thought; and ... as I was till
the age of twenty a regular church attendant and somewhat devout for a
boy of that age, it was a grief to me to find that my brother's turn