This is good, but his poem is even better; and there is a prophetic touch in the line, “Shadowed with something of the future years.”

    A face upturned towards the midnight sky,
    Pale in the glimmer of the pale starlight,
    And all around the black and boundless night,
    And voices of the winds which bode and cry. 
    A childish face, but grave with curves that lie
      Ready to breathe in laughter or in tears,
      Shadowed with something of the future years
    That makes one sorrowful, I know not why. 
    O still, small face, like a white petal torn
      From a wild rose by autumn winds and flung
      On some dark stream the hurrying waves among: 
    By what strange fates and whither art thou borne?

Laura had many poems written to her from many lovers.  My daughter Elizabeth Bibesco’s godfather, Godfrey Webb—­a conspicuous member of the Souls, not long since dead—­wrote this of her: 

“Half child, half woman.”

Tennyson’s description of Laura in 1883: 

    “Half child, half woman”—­wholly to be loved
    By either name she found an easy way
    Into my heart, whose sentinels all proved
    Unfaithful to their trust, the luckless day
    She entered there.  “Prudence and reason both! 
    Did you not question her?  How was it pray
    She so persuaded you?” “Nor sleep nor sloth,”
    They cried, “o’ercame us then, a child at play
    Went smiling past us, and then turning round
    Too late your heart to save, a woman’s face we found.”

Laura was not a plaster saint; she was a generous, clamative, combative little creature of genius, full of humour, imagination, temperament and impulse.

Some one reading this memoir will perhaps say: 

“I wonder what Laura and Margot were really like, what the differences and what the resemblances between them were.”

The men who could answer this question best would be Lord Gladstone, Arthur Balfour, Lord Midleton, Sir Rennell Rodd, or Lord Curzon (of Kedleston).  I can only say what I think the differences and resemblances were.

Strictly speaking, I was better-looking than Laura, but she had rarer and more beautiful eyes.  Brains are such a small part of people that I cannot judge of them as between her and me; and, at the age of twenty-three, when she died, few of us are at the height of our powers, but Laura made and left a deeper impression on the world in her short life than any one that I have ever known.  What she really had to a greater degree than other people was true spirituality, a feeling of intimacy with the other world and a sense of the love and wisdom of God and His plan of life.  Her mind was informed by true religion; and her heart was fixed.  This did not prevent her from being a very great flirt.  The first time that a man came to Glen and liked me better than Laura, she was immensely surprised—­not more so than I was—­and had it not been for the passionate love which we cherished for each other, there must inevitably have been much jealousy between us.