When I told him he was much surprised: 

“Oh, then you are a sister-in-law of the Ancestor’s, are you?”

This was the first time I ever heard Ribblesdale called “the Ancestor”; and as I did not know what he meant, I said: 

“And who are you?”

To which he replied: 

“I am the Duke of Beaufort and I am not running hares this time.  I will give you the blue habit, but you know you will have to wear a top-hat.”

Margot:  “Good gracious!  I hope I’ve said nothing to offend you?  Do you always do this sort of thing when you meet any one like me for the first time?”

Duke of Beaufort (with a smile, lifting his hat):  “Just as it is the first time you have ever hunted, so it is the first time I have ever met any one like you.”

On the third day with the Beaufort hounds, my horse fell heavily in a ditch with me and, getting up, galloped away.  I was picked up by a good-looking man, who took me into his house, gave me tea and drove me back in his brougham to Easton Grey; I fell passionately in love with him.  He owned a horse called Lardy Dardy, on which he mounted me.

Charty and the others chaffed me much about my new friend, saying that my father would never approve of a Tory and that it was lucky he was married.

I replied, much nettled, that I did not want to marry any one and that, though he was a Tory, he was not at all stupid and would probably get into the Cabinet.

This was my first shrewd political prophecy, for he is in the Cabinet now.

I cannot look at him without remembering that he was the first man I was ever in love with, and that, at the age of seventeen, I said he would be in the Cabinet in spite of his being a Tory.

For pure unalloyed happiness those days at Easton Grey were undoubtedly the most perfect of my life.  Lucy’s sweetness to me, the beauty of the place, the wild excitement of riding over fences and the perfect certainty I had that I would ride better than any one in the whole world gave me an insolent confidence which no earthquake could have shaken.

Off and on, I felt qualms over my lack of education; and when I was falling into a happy sleep, dreaming I was overriding hounds, echoes of “Pray, Mamma” out of Mrs. Markham, or early punishments of unfinished poems would play about my bed.

On one occasion at Easton Grey, unable to sleep for love of life, I leant out of the window into the dark to see if it was thawing.  It was a beautiful night, warm and wet, and I forgot all about my education.

The next day, having no mount, I had procured a hireling from a neighbouring farmer, but to my misery the horse did not turn up at the meet; Mr. Golightly, the charming parish priest, said I might drive about in his low black pony-carriage, called in those days a Colorado beetle, but hunting on wheels was no role for me and I did not feel like pursuing the field.