with
many of their happiest hours. No one could have combined in a way more
winning than hers the discriminations of fashionable life with an inborn
passion for poetry. She was perfect in features, slight as a sylph in
figure, and her large dark eyes alternately gleamed with laughter and
were grave as though she were listening for a voice from some vague
beyond. Many of her phrases, when she was speaking of social matters,
were like rapiers with the tip of which, as though by accident, she
would just touch the foibles of her nearest and dearest friends, the
result being a delicate puncture rather than the infliction of a wound.

She first became known as a poetess by a small volume of lyrics called
_From Dawn to Noon_, in which, if, as some say, poetry be
self-revelation, her success, according to certain of her censors, was
somewhat too complete. The same criticism was provoked by her second
volume, _Denzil Place_, a novel in blank verse interwoven with songs.
Whatever her censors may have said about it, this, from first to last,
was a work of real inspiration. Few who have read it will have forgotten
the song beginning:

You gave to me on that dear night of parting
So much, so little; and yet everything,

or will have failed to recognize the musical ear of one who has given us
the liquid melody of two such lines as these:

The tremulous convolvulus whose closing blue eye misses
The faint shadow on the dial that foretells the evening hour.

At all events, whatever her merits as a poetess, she was something like
a living poem for a certain group of friends, of whom I happened to be
one. This group comprised men such as Wilfrid Blunt, Lord Lytton,
Philip Currie, Hamilton Aide, Frederick Locker, Clair Vyner, Sir Baldwin
Leighton, and others, all of whom had in them a natural appreciation of
poetry, while some of them were poets themselves. With a more or less
intimate, though loosely formed, group like this my memory associates
many small gatherings, which generally took the form of dinners, either
at "Violet Fane's" own house in Grosvenor Place, or at Hurlingham, or at
the "Star and Garter," or at Vyner's house among its gardens and woods
at Combe, where we would linger, forgetful of time, and feeling no
inclination to join any larger company.

But of all the worlds which, within the world, were more or less
self-cohesive and separate, that in which I felt myself most at home was
the Catholic. At