So, invariably, tactful secretaries or assistant secretaries were told off to explain to her—­ever so nicely—­that “she was no business woman” (this, to the daughter of wholesale manufacturers, sounded rather flattering), and that though she was invaluable as a “name,” as a patroness, or one of eighteen Vice Presidents, she was of no use whatever as a worker.

She had no country house to place at the disposal of the Government as a convalescent home.  Michael after a few experiments forbade her offering any hospitality at No. 1 Park Crescent to invalid officers.  Such as were entrusted to her in the spring of 1915 soon found that she was—­as they phrased it—­“a pompous little, middle-class fool,” wielding no authority.  They larked in the laboratory with Red Cross nurses, broke specimens, and did very unkind and noisy things ... besides smoking in both the large and the small dining-rooms.  So, after the summer of 1915, she lived very much alone, except that she had the Adams children from Marylebone to spend the day with her occasionally.

Poor Mrs. Adams, though a valiant worker, was very downcast and unhappy.  She confided to Mrs. Rossiter that although she dearly loved her Bert—­“and a better husband I defy you to find”—­he never seemed all hers.  “Always so wrapped up in that Miss Warren or ’er cousin the barrister.”  And no sooner had war broken out than off he was to France, as a kind of missionary, she believed—­the Young Men’s Christian Something or other; “though before the War he didn’t seem particular stuck on religion, and it was all she could do to get him sometimes to church on a Sunday morning.  Oh yes:  she got ’er money all right; and she couldn’t say too much of Mr. and Mrs. Rossiter’s kindness.  There was Bert, not doin’ a stroke of work for the Professor, and yet his pay going on all the same.  Indeed she was putting money by, because Bert was kep’ out there, and all found.”

However his two pretty children were some consolation to Mrs. Rossiter, whom they considered as a very grand lady and one that was lavishly kind.

Mrs. Rossiter tried sometimes in 1915 having working parties in her house or in the studio; and if she could attract workers gave them such elaborate lunches and plethoric teas that very little work was done, especially as she herself loved a long, aimless gossip about the Royal Family or whether Lord Kitchener had ever really been in love.  Or she tried, since she was a poor worker herself—­her only jersey and muffler were really finished by her maid—­reading aloud to the knitters or stitchers, preferably from the works of Miss Charlotte Yonge or some similar novelist of a later date.  But that was found to be too disturbing to their sense of the ludicrous.  For she read very stiltedly, with a strange exotic accent for the love passages or the death scenes.  As Lady Victoria Freebooter said, she would have been priceless at a music-hall matinee which was raising funds for war charities, if only she could have been induced to read passages from Miss Yonge in that voice for a quarter of an hour.  Even the Queen would have had to laugh.