In trying to include in these divagations the names of some of the chief among the friends of Martin Ross, I am met at once by the thought of her brothers and sisters. These were first in her life, and they held their place in it, and in her heart, in a manner that is not always given to brothers and sisters. Two griefs, the death of her eldest brother, Robert, and of the sister next to her in age, Edith Dawson, struck her with a force that can best be measured by what the loss of two people so entirely lovable meant to others less near to them than she. Handsome and amusing, charming and generous, one may go on heaping up adjectives, yet come no nearer to explaining to those who did not know Edith what was lost when she died. Many of the times to which Martin looked back with most enjoyment were spent with Edith and her husband, Cuthbert Dawson. Colonel Dawson was then in the Queen’s Bays, and Martin’s stories of those soldiering days were full of riding, and steam-launching, and motoring (the last at an early period in history, when, in Connemara at all events, a motor was described by the poor people as “a hell-cart,” and received as such). All these things, and the more dangerous the better, were what she and Edith found their pleasure in, with the spirit that took all the fun that was going in its stride, and did not flinch when trouble, suffering, and sorrow had to be faced.

Of Robert, she has herself written, and now but one brother and one sister of all that brilliant family remain; Mr. James Martin, the Head of the House, and Mrs. Hamilton Currey, whose husband, the late Commander Hamilton Currey, R.N., was a distinguished writer on naval matters, and was one whose literary opinion was very deeply valued by Martin.

She was, as Captain Gwynn has said, “a generous letter-writer,” and I have been allowed by him and by one of her very special friends, Mrs. Campbell, to make extracts from some of her letters to them. Her letters, as Mrs. Campbell says, “have so much of her delightful self in them,” that I very much regret that, for various reasons, I have not been able to print more of them.

Another of her great friends was Miss Nora Tracey, with whom she was staying in Ulster at the tremendous moment of the signing of the Ulster Covenant. Few things ever made a deeper political impression upon Martin than did that visit, and the insight that she then gained into Ulster and its fierce intensity of purpose did not cease to influence her views. Whatever political opinions may be held, and however much the attitude of No Compromise may be regretted, the impressiveness of Ulster has to be acknowledged. No one was more sensitive to this than Martin, and an article that, at this time, she wrote and sent to the Spectator was inspired by what she saw and heard in the North during that time of crisis.

Name after name of her friends comes to me, and I can only feel the futility of writing them down, and thinking that in so doing it is possible to explain her talent for friendship, her fine and faithful enthusiasm for the people whom she liked; still less to indicate how much their affection, and interest, and sympathy helped to fill her life, and to make it what it was, a happy one.

A few names at least I may record.

Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Helps, Rose Helps, Mr. C. L. Graves, Lady Gregory, Mrs. Wynne (who is one of Lord Morris’s daughters, and is one of a family of old Galway friends and neighbours), Miss Gertrude Sweetnam, Miss A. S. Kinkead, Sir Horace Plunkett, Fan Morris, “Jem” Barlow, and Martin Ross’s kinsman, Mr. Justice Archer Martin, Justice of Appeal, Victoria, B.C.

It is of no avail to prolong the list, though I could do so (and I ask to be forgiven for unintentional omissions), and I will do no more than touch on her many friends among our many relations. Rose Barton, Ethel Penrose (my own oldest friend, loved by Martin more than most), Violet Coghill, Loo-Loo Plunket, Jim Penrose (that “Professor of Embroidery and Collector of Irish Point” to whom she dedicated the “Patrick’s Day Hunt”), and, nearest of all after her own family, my sister and my five brothers, to all of whom she was as another sister, only, as the Army List says, “with precedence of that rank.”

An end must come. I am afraid I have forgotten much, and I know I have failed in much that I had hoped to do, but I know, too, however far I may have come short, that the memory of Martin Ross is safe with her friends.