to whom I was introduced by Mr. George
Bernard Shaw twenty years ago: She was born in 1872, as _Who's Who_
will tell you; also that she was the daughter and eldest child of a
famous physician (Sir Meldrum Fraser) who wrought some marvellous
cures in the 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties, chiefly by dieting
and psycho-therapy. (He got his knighthood in the first jubilee year
for reducing to reasonable proportions the figure of good-hearted,
thoroughly kindly, and much loved Princess Mary of Oxford.)
He--Honoria's father--was married to a beautiful woman, a relation
of Bessie Rayner Parkes, with inherited advanced views on the Rights
and Position of Woman. Lady Fraser was, indeed, an early type of
Suffragist and also wrote some poetry which was far from bad. They
had two children: Honoria, born, as I say, in 1872; and John (John
Stuart Mill Fraser was his full name--too great a burden to be
borne) four years later than Honoria, who was devoted to him,
idolized him, as did his mother and father. Honoria went to Bedford
College and Newnham; John to one of the two most famous of our
public schools (I need not be more precise), with Cambridge in view
afterwards.

But in the case of John a tragedy occurred. He had risen to be head
of the school; statesmen with little affectation applauded him on
speech days. He had been brilliant as a batsman, was a champion
swimmer, and _facile princeps_ in the ineptitudes of the classics;
and showed a dazzling originality in other studies scarcely within
the school curriculum. Further he was growing out of boy gawkiness
into a handsome youth of an Apolline mould, when, on the morning of
his eighteenth birthday, he was found dead in his bed, with a bottle
of cyanide of potassium on the bed-table to explain why.

All else was wrapt in mystery ... at any rate it was a mystery I
have no wish to lay bare. The death and the inquest verdict,
"Suicide while of unsound mind, due to overstudy," broke his
father's heart and his mother's: in the metaphorical meaning of
course, because the heart is an unemotional pump and it is the brain
and the nerve centres that suffer from our emotions. Sir Meldrum
Fraser died a year after his son. He left a fortune of eighty
thousand pounds. Half of this went at once to Honoria and the other
half to the life-use of Lady Fraser with a reversion to her
daughter.

Honoria after her father's death left Cambridge and moved her mother
from Harley Street to Queen Anne