iqo8] Fashionable Life at a Gallop 211 



I spent my birthday of sixty-eight as usual at Clouds, where I met, 

 amongst others, the Duchess of Wellington with her delightful daugh- 

 ter Lady Eileen Wellesley, who is clever in the way young ladies are 

 clever nowadays, with a great knowledge of poetry and literature, be- 

 sides being extremely pretty. She read aloud Swinburne to us in a 

 peculiarly sweet voice, and I followed with Mrs. Browning's " Gods of 

 Hellas," a very favourite piece with me. 



" 20th Aug. — At Clouds. George arrived in the afternoon from 

 Elbarrow. With him Shelah, Duchess of Westminster. They had 

 been at the manoeuvres all the morning, had then motored over here, 

 some thirty miles, stopped an hour for tea, and were to motor back, and 

 go out to dinner. This is a good example of the life at high pressure of 

 our ladies of fashion. She has with her in camp, a lady's maid, a foot- 

 man, a chauffeur, and a cook. The Duke in the meanwhile is away 

 motoring in Ireland with another chauffeur, another cook, and more 

 servants, besides a motor boat, the one he races with. The life of both 

 of them is a perpetual gallop. This sort of society cannot last, it will 

 end in Bedlam. 



" 22nd Aug. — To-day old Kipling, Rudyard's father, came to din- 

 ner, and I had a long talk with him about India. I wanted to find out 

 from him, who is a typical Anglo-Indian, what remedy he would apply 

 to the present condition of things. Like all the rest, however, he has 

 no remedy to propose beyond ' severe repression ' for the time being, 

 though he does not pretend that this will cure the disease. He puts 

 down as its causes: (1) The Japanese victories, (2) Education, and 

 (3) Official lack of time to be polite; these are the common explana- 

 tions, but for none of them has he a remedy. The Japanese victories 

 are a fact not to be denied, the education given cannot be withdrawn, 

 the lack of race sympathy cannot be mended. He admits the necessity 

 of a new policy, but can suggest none. 



" Looking over old letters from Burne- Jones to Madeline I was glad 

 to find one from Rottingdean, dated 27 December 1882. ' Thank Mr. 

 Wyndham for sending me a poem, by Wilfrid Blunt, about the Egyp- 

 tian crime. Of course I heartily agree with it, but admired it, too, and 

 felt it in parts a real poem.' This was the ' Wind and the Whirlwind,' 



" To-day Percy read out to us an act of one of Bernard Shaw's plays. 

 He reads very well, having an excellent voice, and some skill in dealing 

 with dialects. 



" 30th Aug. (Sunday). — I have been reading Father Tyrrell's new 

 book. ' Medievalism.' The reasoning of it is forcible, but the tone 

 petulant and undignified; it takes that most difficult of all forms, an 

 open leter addressed to Cardinal Mercier in answer to a Pastoral issued 

 by him to his Belgian Diocese against Modernism. Mercier's Pastoral, 



