“The pride of possession and proprietorship is a common and a human one, but the real artist makes everything he admires his own:  no one can rob him of this; he sees value in unsigned pictures and promise in unfinished ones; he not only discovers and interprets, but almost creates beauty by the fire of his criticisms and the inwardness of his preception.  Papa was too self-centred for this; a large side of art was hidden from him; anything mysterious, suggestive, archaic, whether Italian, Spanish or Dutch, frankly bored him.  His feet were planted firmly on a very healthy earth; he liked art to be a copy of nature, not of art.  The modern Burne-Jones and Morris school, with what he considered its artificiality and affectations, he could not endure.  He did not realise that it originated in a reaction from early-Victorianism and mid-Victorianism.  He lost sight of much that is beautiful in colour and fancy and all the drawing and refinement of this school, by his violent prejudices.  His opinions were obsessions.  Where he was original was not so much in his pictures but in the mezzotints, silver, china and objets d’art which he had collected for many years.

“Whatever he chose, whether it was a little owl, a dog, a nigger, a bust, a Cupid in gold, bronze, china or enamel, it had to have some human meaning, some recognisable expression which made it lovable and familiar to him.  He did not care for the fantastic, the tortured or the ecclesiastical; saints, virgins, draperies and crucifixes left him cold; but an old English chest, a stout little chair or a healthy oriental bottle would appeal to him at once.

“No one enjoyed his own possessions more naively and enthusiastically than my father; he would often take a candle and walk round the pictures in his dressing-gown on his way to bed, loitering over them with tenderness—­I might almost say emotion.

“When I was alone with him, tucked up reading on a sofa, he would send me upstairs to look at the Sir Joshuas:  Lady Gertrude Fitz-Patrick, Lady Crosbie or Miss Ridge.

“‘She is quite beautiful to-night,’ he would say.  ’Just run up to the drawing-room, Margot, and have a look at her.’

“It was not only his collections that he was proud of, but he was proud of his children; we could all do things better than any one else!  Posie could sing, Lucy could draw, Laura could play, I could ride, etc.; our praises were stuffed down newcomers’ throats till every one felt uncomfortable.  I have no want of love to add to my grief at his death, but I much regret my impatience and lack of grace with him.

“He sometimes introduced me with emotional pride to the same man or woman two or three times in one evening: 

“’This is my little girl—­very clever, etc., etc.  Colonel Kingscote says she goes harder across country than any one, etc., etc.’

“This exasperated me.  Turning to my mother in the thick of the guests that had gathered in our house one evening to hear a professional singer, he said at the top of his voice while the lady was being conducted to the piano: