CHAPTER IV

Margot falls in love again—­“Havoc” In the hunting field; A fall
and A Ducking—­the famous Mrs. Bo; unheeded advice from A rival—­A
lovers’ quarrel—­Peter jumps in the window—­the American trotter—­
another lover intervenes—­Peter returns from India; illumination
from A dark woman

The first time I ever saw Peter Flower was at Ranelagh, where he had taken my sister Charty Ribblesdale to watch a polo-match.  They were sitting together at an iron table, under a cedar tree, eating ices.  I was wearing a grey muslin dress with a black sash and a black hat, with coral beads round my throat, and heard him say as I came up to them: 

“Nineteen?  Not possible!  I should have said fifteen!  Is that the one that rides so well?”

After shaking hands I sat down and looked about me.

I always notice what men wear; and Peter Flower was the best-dressed man I had ever seen.  I do not know who could have worn his clothes when they were new; but certainly he never did.  After his clothes, what I was most struck by was his peculiar, almost animal grace, powerful sloping shoulders, fascinating laugh and infectious vitality.

Laurence Oliphant once said to me, “I divide the world into life-givers and life-takers”; and I have often had reason to feel the truth of this, being as I am acutely sensitive to high spirits.  On looking back along the gallery of my acquaintance, I can find not more than three or four people as tenacious of life as Peter was:  Lady Desborough, Lady Cunard, my son Anthony and myself.  There are various kinds of high spirits:  some so crude and rough-tongued that they vitiate what they touch and estrange every one of sensibility and some so insistent that they tire and suffocate you; but Peter’s vitality revived and restored every one he came in contact with; and, when I said good-bye to him that day at Ranelagh, although I cannot remember a single sentence of any interest spoken by him or by me, my mind was absorbed in thinking of when and how I could meet him again.

In the winter of that same year I went with the Ribblesdales to stay with Peter’s brother, Lord Battersea, to have a hunt.  I took with me the best of hats and habits and two leggy and faded hirelings, hoping to pick up a mount.  Charty having twisted her knee the day after we arrived, this enabled me to ride the horse on which Peter was to have mounted her; and full of spirits we all went off to the meet of the Bicester hounds.  I had hardly spoken three words to my benefactor, but Ribblesdale had rather unwisely told him that I was the best rider to hounds in England.