1904] Lunch with Margot 103 



" 2nd July. — Good old Watts is dead, full of years and honour. His 

 pictures this year at the New Gallery were almost as good as ever they 

 were, and he was well and in good spirits down to a few days before 

 his end. He was a great painter — on the whole the greatest in Eng- 

 land since Reynolds. 



" Another death is that of Stanley, the explorer, who has left £135,- 

 000, got by doing dirty work for the King of the Belgians on the 

 Congo, a charlatan, who has had the cheek to express a wish he should 

 be buried in Westminster Abbey. 



" 6th July. — Lunched with Margot, at her house in Cavendish 

 Square. On the doorstep I found myself with Coquelin pere, to 

 whom Margot gave an effusive welcome. We had an amusing meal, 

 Margot making her little girl Elizabeth recite some verses of Steven- 

 son's about a butterfly, which the child did prettily, dressed up in a 

 Velasquez costume with stiff hoop and petticoat. Coquelin good- 

 naturedly suggested that ' perhaps Mademoiselle would be shy,' but 

 Margot would not hear of it, ' There is no shyness,' she said, ' in this 

 family,' nor was the child at all embarrassed. Coquelin then gave a 

 little entertainment of his own, imitating an Englishman's account of 

 him, Coquelin, in absurd Anglo-French. 



" 13th July. — Lunched with George. He is dying to be out of 

 office, and live an irresponsible life away from politics, which he 

 declares to be an abomination. He says that I am the only person who 

 has learnt the secret how to live. We are to spend next Saturday to 

 Monday together in Worth Forest, where I have seen deer lately. 

 They seem to have come originally from Buckhurst, where the Park 

 fence had been allowed to get out of repair, and they have spread 

 themselves over the whole Forest district as far west as Shelley's 

 Plain and Leonardslee, a distance of some twenty miles, and are to be 

 found in small herds in all the great woodlands. It is a reoccupation 

 of the Forest by its ancient inhabitants (not by strangers), where they 

 do no harm, and so are preserved by everybody, except the German 

 Count Miinster at Maresfield, who complains that they interfere with 

 his chassc. This comes of Harvey Pechell's snobbery in bequeathing 

 Maresfield, an old Shelley property left him by his wife, to the Prussian 

 Ambassador, because he had been socially polite to him. 



" 16th July. — George has been with me in Worth Forest occupying 

 a tent we have pitched. He declares he will take five years holiday 

 after the General Election. We have ridden all over the Forest in 

 Tilgate and Smith's Charity, talking always of past days, and the 

 glories of the Crabbet Club, and devising schemes of an ideal life in 

 woods, with a pleasant society of men and women on Boccaccian lines, 

 which we are to call the Fellowship of the Holy Ghosts, but George 

 returns to his parliament to-morrow. 



