Mrs. Trubner was the life of this home. Anglo-Belgian by early relation
and education, she combined four types in one. When speaking English,
she struck me as the type of an accomplished and refined British matron;
in French, her whole nature seemed Parisienne; in Flemish, she was
altogether Flamande; and in German, Deutsch. If Cerberus was three
gentlemen in one, Mrs. Trubner was four ladies united. Very well read,
she conversed not only well on any subject, but, what is very unusual in
her sex, with sincere interest, and not merely to entertain. If
interrupted in a conversation she resumed the subject! This is a
remarkable trait!

The next day after our arrival Mrs. Trubner took Mrs. Leland, during a
walk, to call on George Eliot, and that evening G. H. Lewes, Hepworth
Dixon, and some others came to a reception at the Trubners'. Both of
these men were, as ever, very brilliant and amusing in conversation. I
met them very often after this, both at their homes and about London. I
also became acquainted with George Eliot or Mrs. Lewes, who left on me
the marked impression, which she did on all, of being a woman of genius,
though I cannot recall anything remarkable which I ever heard from her. I
note this because there were most extraordinary reports of her utterances
among her admirers. A young American lady once seriously asked me if it
were true that at the Sunday afternoon receptions in South Bank one could
always see rows of twenty or thirty of the greatest men in England, such
as Carlyle, Froude, and Herbert Spencer, all sitting with their
note-books silently taking down from her lips the ideas which they
subsequently used in their writings! There seemed, indeed, to be afloat
in America among certain folk an idea that something enormous,
marvellous, and inspired went on at these receptions, and that George
Eliot posed as a Pythia or Sibyl, as the great leading mind of England,
and lectured while we listened. There is no good portrait, I believe, of
her. She had long features and would have been called plain but for her
solemn, earnest eyes, which had an expression quite in keeping with her
voice, which was one not easily forgotten. I never detected in her any
trace of genial humour, though I doubt not that it was latent in her; and
I thought her a person who had drawn her ideas far more from books and an
acquaintance with certain types of humanity whom she had set herself
deliberately to study--albeit w