“My Lord!  How you can dance!  Who taught you, I’d like to know?”

I turned round and saw the lovely face of Kate Vaughan.  She wore a long, black, clinging crepe-de-chine dress and a little black bonnet with a velvet bow over one ear; her white throat and beautiful arms were bare.

“Why,” she said, “you could understudy me, I believe!  You come round and I’ll show you my parts and you will never lack for goldie boys!”

I remember the expression, because I had no idea what she meant by it.  She explained that, if I became her under-study at the Gaiety, I would make my fortune.  I was surprised that she had taken me for a professional, but not more so than she was when I told her that I had never had a lesson in ballet-dancing in my life.

My lovely coach, however, fell sick and had to give up the stage.  She wrote me a charming letter, recommending me to her own dancing-master, M. d’Auban, under whom I studied for several years.

One day, on returning from my early dancing-lesson to Thomas’s Hotel, I found my father talking to Lord Rosebery.  He said I had better run away; so, after kissing him and shaking hands with the stranger I left the room.  As I shut the door, I heard Lord Rosebery say: 

“Your girl has beautiful eyes.”

I repeated this upstairs, with joy and excitement, to the family, who, being in a good humour, said they thought it was true enough if my eyes had not been so close together.  I took up a glass, had a good look at myself and was reluctantly compelled to agree.

I asked my father about Lord Rosebery afterwards, and he said: 

“He is far the most brilliant young man living and will certainly be Prime Minister one day.”

Lord Rosebery was born with almost every advantage:  he had a beautiful smile, an interesting face, a remarkable voice and natural authority.  When at Oxford, he had been too much interested in racing to work and was consequently sent down—­a punishment shared at a later date and on different grounds by another distinguished statesman, the present Viscount Grey—­but no one could say he was not industrious at the time that I knew him and a man of education.  He made his fame first by being Mr. Gladstone’s chairman at the political meetings in the great Midlothian campaign, where he became the idol of Scotland.  Whenever there was a crowd in the streets or at the station, in either Glasgow or Edinburgh, and I enquired what it was all about, I always received the same reply: 

“Rozbury!”

I think Lord Rosebery would have had a better nervous system and been a happier man if he had not been so rich.  Riches are over-estimated in the Old Testament:  the good and successful man receives too many animals, wives, apes, she-goats and peacocks.  The values are changed in the New:  Christ counsels a different perfection and promises another reward.  He does not censure the man of great possessions, but He points out that his riches will hamper him in his progress to the Kingdom of Heaven and that he would do better to sell all; and He concludes with the penetrating words: