emen in
gorgeous attire, and murals and tapestries in the marble halls. But I
quickly forgot all of this grandeur listening to the names of guests
being called off as they entered the drawing-room: Mr. Gladstone and
Mrs. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery and the Marquis of Salisbury, Mrs. Humphry
Ward, looking fatter and older than I had expected, officers, colonels,
viscounts, and ladies, and then Tom and Mary--but they were not called
off that way. I wanted to meet Mr. Gladstone, and hoped I might even be
near him at dinner; but I sat between a colonel and a young captain of
the Scots Greys.

Mr. Gladstone was on the other side of the table. It was a huge table,
more than five feet wide and very long. My husband was somewhere out of
sight at the other end. Mr. Gladstone mentioned the fund being raised
for the victims of the Paris Opera Comique fire. It is good form to be
silent in the presence of death, especially when death is colossal, and
the English never fail to follow good form. There was a sudden lull at
our end of the table.

It was I who broke that silence. I was touched by the generosity of
England, and said so. Since my arrival I had daily noted that England
was giving to India, sending relief to Greece and Armenia, raising a
fund for the fire sufferers, and celebrating the Queen's Jubilee by
feeding the poor. I addressed my look and my admiring words to Mr.
Gladstone.

Either my sincerity or the embarrassment he knew would follow my
disregard of "the thing that is done" moved Mr. Gladstone's sympathy.
He smiled across the table at me and answered, "I am so glad you see
these good points of England." It was about the most gracious thing
that was ever done to me in my life. In England it is bad form to speak
across the table. One speaks to one's neighbor on the right or to one's
neighbor on the left; but the line across the table is foreign soil and
must not be shouted across.

That night my husband said: "I forgot to tell you. They never talk
across the table in England." I chided him, and with some cause. I had
soon discovered that in England, as in America, it was not enough to be
"my own natural self." But I came to love Mr. Gladstone. Long after
that I told him the story of Mrs. Grant, who, when an awkward young man
had broken one of her priceless Sevres after-dinner coffee cups, dropped
hers on the floor to meet him on the same level. "Any woman who, to put
any one at ease, will break a