My friendship with Lord and Lady Manners, [Footnote:  Avon Tyrrell, Christchurch, Hants.  Lady Manners was a Miss Fane.] of Avon Tyrrell, probably made more difference to the course of my life than anything that had happened in it.

Riding was what I knew and cared most about; and I dreamt of High Leicestershire.  I had hunted in Cheshire, where you killed three foxes a day and found yourself either clattering among cottages and clothes-lines, or blocked by carriages and crowds; I knew the stiff plough and fine horses of Yorkshire and the rotten grass in the Bicester; I had struggled over the large fences and small enclosures of the Grafton and been a heroine in the select fields and large becks with the Burton; and the Beaufort had seen the dawn of my fox-hunting; but Melton was a name which brought the Hon. Crasher before me and opened a vista on my future of all that was fast, furious and fashionable.

When I was told that I was going to sit next to the Master of the Quorn at dinner, my excitement knew no bounds.

Gordon Cunard—­whose brother Bache owned the famous hounds in Market Harborough—­had insisted on my joining him at a country-house party given for a ball.  On getting the invitation I had refused, as I hardly knew our hostess—­the pretty Mrs. Farnham—­ but after receiving a spirited telegram from my new admirer—­one of the best men to hounds in Leicestershire—­I changed my mind.  In consequence of this decision a double event took place.  I fell in love with Peter Flower—­a brother of the late Lord Battersea—­and formed an attachment with a couple whose devotion and goodness to me for more than twenty years encouraged and embellished my glorious youth.

Lord Manners, or “Hoppy,” as we called him, was one of the few men I ever met whom the word “single-minded” described.  His sense of honour was only equalled by his sense of humour; and a more original, tender, truthful, uncynical, real being never existed.  He was a fine sportsman and had won the Grand Military when he was in the Grenadiers, riding one of his own hunters; he was also the second gentleman in England to win the Grand National in 1882, on a thoroughbred called Seaman, who was by no means every one’s horse.  For other people he cared nothing.  “Decidement je n’aime pas les autres,” he would have said, to quote my son-in-law, Antoine Bibesco.

His wife often said that, but for her, he would not have asked a creature inside the house; be this as it may, no host and hostess could have been more socially susceptible or given their guests a warmer welcome than Con and Hoppy Manners.

What I loved and admired in him was his keenness and his impeccable unworldliness.  He was perfectly independent of public opinion and as free from rancour as he was from fear, malice or acerbity.  He never said a stupid thing.  Some people would say that this is not a compliment, but the amount of silly things that I have heard clever people say makes me often wonder what is left for the stupid.