He asked me
to sit down next to him in a conspicuous place; and we talked
through two dances. I was told afterwards that some one who had
been watching us said to him:
"I hear you are going to marry Margot Tennant."
To which he replied:
"No, that is not so. I rather think of having a career of my own."
Lord Rosebery's two antagonists, Sir William Harcourt and Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman, were very different men.
Sir William ought to have lived in the eighteenth century. To
illustrate his sense of humour: he told me that women should be
played with like fish; only in the one case you angle to make them
rise and in the other to make them fall. He had a great deal of
wit and nature, impulsive generosity of heart and a temperament
that clouded his judgment. He was a man to whom life had added
nothing; he was perverse, unreasonable, brilliant, boisterous and
kind when I knew him; but he must have been all these in the
nursery.
At the time of the split in our party over the Boer War, when we
were in opposition and the phrase "methods of barbarism" became
famous, my personal friends were in a state of the greatest
agitation. Lord Spencer, who rode with me nearly every morning,
deplored the attitude which my husband had taken up. He said it
would be fatal to his future, dissociating himself from the
Pacifists and the Pro-Boers, and that he feared the Harcourts
would never speak to us again. As I was devoted to the latter, and
to their son Lulu [Footnote: The present Viscount Harcourt.
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