Let it not be inferred that I am criticising them as they now are,
or that their attitude towards myself was at any time lacking in
sympathy. Blindness of heart does not imply hardness; and
expression is a matter of temperament or impulse; hut it was their
attitude towards life that was different from my own. They over-
valued brains, which was a strange fault, as they were all
remarkably clever. Hardly any Prime Minister has had famous
children, but the Asquiths were all conspicuous in their different
ways: Raymond and Violet the most striking, Arthur the most
capable, Herbert a poet and Cyril the shyest and the rarest.
Cys Asquith, who was the youngest of the family, combined what was
best in all of them morally and intellectually and possessed what
was finer than brains.
He was two, when his mother died, and a clumsy ugly little boy
with a certain amount of graceless obstinacy, with which both
Tennants and Asquiths were equally endowed. To the casual observer
he would have appeared less like me than any of my step-family,
but as a matter of fact he and I had the most in common; we shared
a certain spiritual foundation and moral aspiration that solder
people together through life.
It is not because I took charge of him at an early age that I say
he is more my own than the others, but because, although he did
not always agree with me, he never misunderstood me. He said at
Murren one day, when he was seventeen and we had been talking
together on life and religion:
"It must be curious for you, Margot, seeing all of us laughing at
things that make you cry.
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