Unfortunately for me, my father had business which kept him in London.  He was in treaty with Lord Gerard to buy his uninteresting house in an uninteresting square.  The only thing that pleased me in Grosvenor Square was the iron gate.  When I could not find the key of the square and wanted to sit out with my admirers, after leaving a ball early, I was in the habit of climbing over these gates in my tulle dress.  This was a feat which was attended by more than one risk:  if you did not give a prominent leap off the narrow space from the top of the gate, you would very likely be caught up by the tulle fountain of your dress, in which case you might easily lose your life; or, if you did not keep your eye on the time, you would very likely be caught by an early house-maid, in which case you might easily lose your reputation.  No one is a good judge of her own reputation, but I like to think that those iron gates were the silent witnesses of my milder manner.

My father, however, loved Grosvenor Square and, being anxious that Laura and I should come out together, bought the house in 1881.

No prodigal was ever given a warmer welcome than I was when I left the area of the Great Western Railway; but the problem of how to finish my education remained and I was determined that I would not make my debut till I was eighteen.  What with reading, hunting and falling in love at Easton Grey, I was not at all happy and wanted to be alone.

I knew no girls and had no friends except my sisters and was not eager to talk to them about my affairs; I never could at any time put all of myself into discussion which degenerates into gossip.  I had not formed the dangerous habit of writing good letters about myself, dramatizing the principal part.  I shrank then, as I do now, from exposing the secrets and sensations of life.  Reticence should guard the soul and only those who have compassion should be admitted to the shrine.  When I peer among my dead or survey my living friends, I see hardly any one with this quality.  For the moment my cousin Nan Tennant, Mrs. Arthur Sassoon, Mrs. James Rothschild, Antoine Bibesco, and my son and husband are the only people I can think of who possess it.

John Morley has, in carved letters of stone upon his chimney-piece, Bacon’s fine words, “The nobler a soul, the more objects of compassion it hath.”

When I first read them, I wondered where I could meet those souls and I have wondered ever since.  To have compassion you need courage, you must fight for the objects of your pity and you must feel and express tenderness towards all men.  You will not meet disinterested emotion, though you may seek it all your life, and you will seldom find enough pity for the pathos of life.