My husband is a man of disinterested emotion.  One morning, when he and I were in Paris, where we had gone for a holiday, I found him sitting with his head in his hands and the newspaper on his knee.  I saw he was deeply moved and, full of apprehension, I put my arm round him and asked if he had had bad news.  He pointed to a paragraph in the paper and I read how some of the Eton boys had had to break the bars of their windows to escape from fire and others had been burnt to death.  We knew neither a boy nor the parent of any boy at Eton at that time, but Henry’s eyes were full of tears, and he could not speak.

I had the same experience with him over the wreck of the Titanic.  When we read of that challenging, luxurious ship at bay in the ice-fields and the captain sending his unanswered signals to the stars, we could not sit through dinner.

I knew no one of this kind of sympathy in my youth, and my father was too busy and my mother too detached for me to have told them anything.  I wanted to be alone and I wanted to learn.  After endless talks it was decided that I should go to Germany for four or five months and thus settle the problem of an unbegun but finishing education.

Looking back on this decision, I think it was a remarkable one.  I had a passion for dancing and my father wanted me to go to balls; I had a genius for horses and adored hunting; I had such a wonderful hack that every one collected at the Park rails when they saw me coming into the Row; but all this did not deflect me from my purpose and I went to Dresden alone with a stupid maid at a time when—­if not in England, certainly in Germany—­I might have passed as a moderate beauty.

CHAPTER V

A DRESDEN LODGING HOUSE—­MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE WITH AN OFFICER AFTER THE OPERA——­AN ELDERLY AMERICAN ADMIRER—­YELLOW ROSES, GRAF VON—­ VON—­AND MOTIFS FROM WAGNER

Frau von Mach kept a ginger-coloured lodging-house high up in Luttichau-strasse.  She was a woman of culture and refinement; her mother had been English and her husband, having gone mad in the Franco-Prussian war, had left her penniless with three children.  She had to work for her living and she cooked and scrubbed without a thought for herself from dawn till dark.

There were thirteen pianos on our floor and two or three permanent lodgers.  The rest of the people came and went—­men, women and boys of every nationality, professionals and amateurs—­but I was too busy to care or notice who went or who came.

Although my mother was bold and right to let me go as a bachelor to Dresden, I could not have done it myself.  Later on, like every one else, I sent my stepdaughter and daughter to be educated in Germany for a short time, but they were chaperoned by a woman of worth and character, who never left them:  my German nursery-governess, who came to me when Elizabeth was four.