“Just wait one moment, will you?  I want to know if you are as good as Peter always tells me you are; don’t answer till I see your eyes ...”

She took two candles off the chimneypiece and placed them on the table near me, a little in front of my face, and then knelt upon the ground; I looked at her wonderful wild eyes and stretched out my hands towards her.

“Nonsense!” I said.  “I am not in the least good!  Get up!  When I see you kneeling at my feet, I feel sorry for you.”

The lady (getting up abruptly):  “For God’s sake don’t pity me!”

Thinking over the situation in the calm of my room, I had no qualms as to either the elopement or the suicide, hut I felt a revulsion of feeling towards Peter.  His lack of moral indignation and purpose, his intractability in all that was serious and his incapacity to improve had been cutting a deep though unconscious division between us for years; and I determined at whatever cost, after this, that I would say good-bye to him.

A few days later, Lord Dufferin came to see me in Grosvenor Square.

“Margot,” he said, “why don’t you marry?  You are twenty-seven; and life won’t go on treating you so well if you go on treating it like this.  As an old friend who loves you, let me give you one word of advice.  You should marry in spite of being in love, but never because of it.”

Before I went away to Italy, Peter and I, with passion-lit eyes and throbbing hearts, had said goodbye to each other for ever.

The relief of our friends at our parting was so suffocating that I clung to the shelter of my new friend, the stranger of that House of Commons dinner.

CHAPTER V

The Asquith family tree—­Herbert H. ASQUITH’s mother—­Asquith’s
first marriage; meets Margot Tennant for first time—­talk till
dawn on house of Commons’ Terrace; other meetings—­engagement A
London sensation—­marriage an event

My husband’s father was Joseph Dixon Asquith, a cloth-merchant, in Morley, at that time a small town outside Leeds.  He was a man of high character who held Bible classes for young men.  He married a daughter of William Willans, of Huddersfield, who sprang of an old Yorkshire Puritan stock.

He died when he was thirty-five, leaving four children:  William Willans, Herbert Henry, Emily Evelyn and Lilian Josephine.  They were brought up by their mother, who was a woman of genius.  I named my only daughter [Footnote:  Princess Bibesco.] after Goethe’s mother, but was glad when I found out that her grandmother Willans had been called Elizabeth.

William Willans—­who is dead—­was the eldest of the family and a clever little man.  He taught at Clifton College for over thirty years.