“A murderer has passed below our windows.”  The awe-struck ladies questioned her reverently but ardently as to how she knew and what she felt.  Had she visualised him?  Would she recognise the guilty one if she saw him and, after recognising him, feel it on her conscience if she did not give him up to the law?  One lady proposed that we should all go round to the nearest police-station and added that a case of this kind, if proved, would do more to dispell doubts on spirits than all the successful raps, taps, turns and tables.  Being the only person in the window at the time, I strained my eyes up and down Brook Street to see the murderer, but there was not a creature in sight.

Madame Blavatsky turned out to be an audacious swindler.

To return to Chatsworth:  our host, the Duke of Devonshire, was a man whose like we shall never see again; he stood by himself and could have come from no country in the world but England.  He had the figure and appearance of an artisan, with the brevity of a peasant, the courtesy of a king and the noisy sense of humour of a Falstaff.  He gave a great, wheezy guffaw at all the right things, and was possessed of endless wisdom.  He was perfectly disengaged from himself, fearlessly truthful and without pettiness of any kind.

Bryan, the American politician, who came over here and heard all our big guns speak—­Rosebery, Chamberlain, Asquith, etc.—­when asked what he thought, said that a Chamberlain was not unknown to them in America, and that they could produce a Rosebery or an Asquith, but that a Hartington no man could find.  His speaking was the finest example of pile-driving the world had ever seen.

After the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Duke and his wife were the great social, semi-political figures of my youth.  One day they came to pay us a visit in Cavendish Square, having heard that our top storey had been destroyed by fire.  They walked round the scorched walls of the drawing-room, with the blue sky overhead, and stopped in front of a picture of a race-horse, given to me on my wedding day by my habit-maker, Alexander Scott (a Scotchman who at my suggestion had made the first patent safety riding-skirt).  The Duke said: 

“I am sorry that your Zoffany and Longhi were burnt, but I myself would far rather have the Herring.” [Footnote:  A portrait by J. F. Herring, sen., of Rockingham, winner of the St. Leger Stakes, 1833, ridden by Sam Darling.]

The Duchess laughed at this and asked me if my baby had suffered from shock, adding: 

“I should be sorry if my little friend, Elizabeth, has had a fright.”

I told her that luckily she was out of London at the time of the fire.  When the Duchess got back to Devonshire House, she sent Elizabeth two tall red wax candles, with a note in which she said: 

“When you brought your little girl here, she wanted the big red candles in my boudoir and I gave them to her; they must have melted in the fire, so I send her these new ones.”