floor, people were dancing, or thought-reading, or making music, as
it pleased them.

Mr. Balfour was there, with whom we had made friends, as fellow-guests,
on a week-end visit to Oxford, not long before; Alfred Lyttelton, then
in the zenith of his magnificent youth; Lord Curzon, then plain Mr.
Curzon, and in the Foreign Office; Mr. Harry Gust; Mr. Rennell Rodd, now
the British Ambassador in Rome, and many others--a goodly company of
young men in their prime. And among the women there was a very high
proportion of beauty, but especially of grace. "The half-lit room, the
dresses and the beauty," says my letter, "reminded one of some _festa_
painted by Watteau or Lancret." But with what a difference! For, after
all, it was English, through and through.

A little after this evening, Laura Tennant came down to spend a day at
Borough Farm with the children and me. Another setting! Our principal
drawing-room there in summer was a sand-pit, shaded by an old ash-tree
and haunted by innumerable sand-martins. It was Ascension Day, and the
commons were a dream of beauty. Our guest, I find, was to have come down
"with Mr. Balfour and Mr. Burne-Jones." But in the end she came down
alone; and we talked all day, sitting under hawthorns white with bloom,
wandering through rushy fields ablaze with marsh marigold and orchis.
She wrote to me the same evening after her return to London:

I sit with my eyes resting on the medieval purple of the
sweet-breathing orchis you gave me, and my thoughts feasting on the
wonderful beauty of the snowy blossom against the blue.... This has
been a real Ascension Day.

Later in the year--in November--she wrote to me from Scotland--she was