Claridge's Hotel, London
14th September

Darling Elizabeth:

Blanche and I are stopping here for a few days before going home. After all the gaiety of Lucerne Blanche declared it would give her the blues to drop suddenly back into Somersetshire, with its biking and tennis and gossip, so we decided to break the fall in London. Of course, town is still en villÉgiature as the French say, but I like it, as one can be so much freer than in the Season.

Bond Street is triste in the mornings, and as for the Park, oh, lÀ lÀ!—the only people one sees there are the hospital nurses and the policemen. We don't get up till eleven, and then go straight to Paquin, till one. The first day we had lunch at Prince's, but there were such funny-looking people there that we have been to the Trocadero since. I am sure those who were at Prince's were there because they had heard it was fashionable. The maÎtre d'hÔtel, who was chef to the bishop of St. Esau, told me that there hadn't been even a baronet across the threshold for two months. I am sure the people came from Leeds and Birmingham, and they stared at one another as if they expected to read Burke or Debrett written on their faces. At the Trocadero the music is good, and though you would never dream of calling the people smart, yet they are interesting. The women look like problem-plays, and I am sure the men spend their time between Sandown Park and St. John's Wood.

We went once to the Empire, but it was awfully stupid, and I never want to go again. Being September, the boxes were empty, and only a few of the orchestra stalls were taken, but the gallery and the pit seemed full, and the Aubrey Beardsley women were walking about just as usual. But such a performance! Blanche and I never laughed once for the night; we were told afterwards that you are not supposed to expect anything funny at the first-class music halls now-a-days; if you want to laugh you must go to the cheap places. A fat woman in tights and a stage smile had some performing parrots and birds, and one or two people in evening-dress, who have left the chorus of the Opera to star, sang something, and there was a huge ballet whose chief features appear to be the time and cost it takes to produce—that was all. You couldn't imagine anything more deadly dull, and a man near us slept all through the ballet. Blanche and I felt utterly exhausted after it; it was so boring. They say the Palace and the Alhambra are not a bit different; only the Palace, in place of the ballet has a Biograph, which wiggles and makes you feel cross-eyed.

We found it much jollier to spend the evenings in the drawing-room at Claridge's. I don't know why we came to such a place, and I certainly never will again. There are very few people stopping in the hotel, a couple of Grand Dukes, some Americans, and the Duchess of Rougemont, who is up in town for a few days. This morning Something Pasha, with a fez, arrived from Cairo, and Eleanora, Countess of Merryone and her boy husband. I am sure it is a love-match, for he won't let her out of his sight, and looks at her as if she were something good to eat. She must be fully twenty-five years older than he and looks it, for he hasn't a hair on his face, and blushes when you speak to him. But she keeps her youth, and when the Society papers call her beautiful they speak the truth for once.

I remember her quite well when I was your age; she was known then as the beautiful Lady Merryone, and Society was divided into two parties, one of which declared that she was the most beautiful woman in England, and the other that Mrs. Palsgrave was. Their photographs were in all the shop windows, and their portraits in every Academy, and fashions were named after them. There was the Palsgrave toque and the Merryone bolero, and everything they did was chronicled in the papers, just as if it mattered. Each tried to outdo the other, and Mrs. Palsgrave, who had the most beautiful feet you ever saw out of marble, went to an historical fancy-ball as Cleopatra, and her feet were absolutely bare. Her portrait was afterwards painted in the costume, but it was hung at the salon, as it was considered too indecent for the Academy. And what a sensation it was when Mr. Palsgrave blew his brains out in the height of a London Season, and left so many debts that Mrs. Palsgrave to get rid of them went on the stage, where a Serene Highness saw her and fell in love with her, and married her. They say you wouldn't recognise her now, she has changed so; she lives somewhere in Germany and is as grey as a badger and as red as a lobster and bloated with beer.

But Eleanora, Countess of Merryone, is still to the fore. Merryone, who was old enough to be her grandfather, died of a fit of jealousy; then she turned Roman Catholic and went into a convent, but it sounds better in books than it is in practice, and she came out again in six months and married a Bishop within a year of Merryone's death, and buried him within another year. She has been a Primrose Dame and a Temperance lecturer and a Theosophist, and kept a stud at Newmarket, and edited a daily, and started for the North Pole but turned back at Iceland, and now she has married this boy. And she isn't a lunatic at large, but a woman who ought to have borne children, and had cares and anxieties.

It makes me feel quite old, when I think of her and Mrs. Palsgrave, and see all the changes of the last eighteen years. But I won't think of time and the Burial Service yet awhile. I saw Valmond in Piccadilly to-day, and I believe I could catch him myself if I tried, for I haven't got a grey hair, at least ThÉrÈse manages to hide them; and I haven't got a moustache, and my eyes haven't got wrinkles round the corners, and my neck hasn't begun to shrink. I am only thirty-five, Elizabeth, and a Society belle's star sets late.—Your dearest Mamma.