I was walking alone on the high road at Chatsworth one afternoon in winter, while the Duchess was indoors playing cards, when I saw the family barouche, a vast vehicle which swung and swayed on C-springs, stuck in the middle of a ploughed field, the horses plunging about in unsuccessful efforts to drag the wheels out of the mud.  The coachman was accompanied by a page, under life size.  Observing their dilemma, I said: 

“Hullo, you’re in a nice fix!  What induced you to go into that field?”

The coachman, who knew me well, explained that they had met a hearse in the narrow part of the road and, as her Grace’s orders were that no carriage was to pass a funeral if it could be avoided, he had turned into the field, where the mud was so deep and heavy that they were stuck.  It took me some time to get assistance; but, after I had unfastened the bearing-reins and mobilised the yokels, the coachman, carriage and I returned safely to the house.

Death was the only thing of which I ever saw the Duchess afraid and, when I referred to the carriage incident and chaffed her about it, she said: 

“My dear child, do you mean to tell me you would not mind dying?  What do you feel about it?”

I answered her, in all sincerity, that I would mind more than anything in the world, but not because I was afraid, and that hearses did not affect me in the least.

She asked me what I was most interested in after hunting and I said politics.  I told her I had always prophesied I would marry a Prime Minister and live in high political circles.  This amused her and we had many discussions about politics and people.  She was interested in my youth and upbringing and made me tell her about it.

As I have said before, we were not popular in Peeblesshire.  My papa and his vital family disturbed the country conventions; and all Liberals were looked upon as aliens by the Scottish aristocracy of those days.  At election times the mill-hands of both sexes were locked up for fear of rows, but in spite of this the locks were broken and the rows were perpetual.  When my father turned out the sitting Tory, Sir Graham Montgomery, in 1880, there were high jinks in Peebles.  I pinned the Liberal colours, with the deftness of a pick-pocket, to the coat-tails of several of the unsuspecting Tory landlords, who had come from great distances to vote.  This delighted the electors, most of whom were feather-stitching up and down the High Street, more familiar with drink than jokes.

The first politicians of note that came to stay with us when I was a girl were Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke.  Just as, later on, my friends (the Souls) discussed which would go farthest, George Curzon, George Wyndham or Harry Cust, so in those days people were asking the same question about Chamberlain and Dilke.  To my mind it wanted no witch to predict that Chamberlain would beat not only Dilke but other men; and Gladstone made a profound mistake in not making him a Secretary of State in his Government of 1885.