At the time of my first marriage, when I met these great men, I had never had the advantage—­I assume that it is an advantage!—­of a single day’s schooling in a real school.  What I have learned outside my own profession I have learned from my environment.  Perhaps it is this which makes me think environment more valuable than a set education, and a stronger agent in forming character even than heredity.  I should have written the externals of character, for primal, inner feelings are, I suppose, always inherited.

Still, my want of education may be partly responsible for the unsatisfactory blankness of my early impressions.  As it takes two to make a good talker, so it takes two to make a good hero—­in print, at any rate.  I was meeting distinguished people at every turn, and taking no notice of them.  At Freshwater I was still so young that I preferred playing Indians and Knights of the Round Table with Tennyson’s sons, Hallam and Lionel, and the young Camerons, to sitting indoors noticing what the poet did and said.  I was mighty proud when I learned how to prepare his daily pipe for him.  It was a long churchwarden, and he liked the stem to be steeped in a solution of sal volatile, or something of that kind, so that it did not stick to his lips.  But he and all the others seemed to me very old.  There were my young knights waiting for me; and jumping gates, climbing trees, and running paper-chases are pleasant when one is young.

It was not to inattentive ears that Tennyson read his poems.  His reading was most impressive, but I think he read Browning’s “Ride from Ghent to Aix” better than anything of his own, except, perhaps, “The Northern Farmer.”  He used to preserve the monotonous rhythm of the galloping horses in Browning’s poem, and made the words come out sharply like hoofs upon a road.  It was a little comic until one got used to it, but that fault lay in the ear of the hearer.  It was the right way and the fine way to read this particular poem, and I have never forgotten it.

In after years I met Tennyson again, when with Henry Irving I acted in two of his plays at the Lyceum.  When I come to those plays, I shall have more to say of him.  Gladstone, too, came into my later life.  Browning I saw once or twice at dinner-parties, but knew him no better than in this early period, when I was Nelly Watts, and heedless of the greatness of great men.  “To meet an angel and not to be afraid is to be impudent.”  I don’t like to confess to it, but I think I must have been, according to this definition, very impudent!

One charming domestic arrangement at Freshwater was the serving of the dessert in a separate room from the rest of the dinner.  And such a dessert it always was!—­fruit piled high on great dishes in Veronese fashion, not the few nuts and an orange of some English households.

It must have been some years after the Freshwater days, yet before the production of “The Cup,” that I saw Tennyson in his carriage outside a jeweler’s shop in Bond Street.