and the tendency of the age to scratch the
surface of things only, are not favourable to the development of this
type of keen intellect, which was based on a thorough knowledge of the
English classics, and on such a high level of culture as modern
trouble-hating women could but seldom hope to attain. Time and time
again I have asked Lady Cork for the origin of some quotation. She
invariably gave it me at once, usually quoting some lines of the
context at the same time. When I complimented her on her wonderful
knowledge of English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, she answered, "In my young days we studied the 'Belles
Lettres'; modern women only study 'Belle's Letters,'" an allusion to a
weekly summary of social events then appearing in the World under that
title, a chronicle voraciously devoured by thousands of women. When the
early prejudice against railways was alluded to by some one who
recalled the storms of protest that the conveyance of the Duke of
Sussex's body by train to Windsor for burial provoked, as being
derogatory to the dignity of a Royal Duke, it was Lady Cork who rapped
out, "I presume in those days, a novel apposition of the quick and the
dead." A certain peer was remarkable alike for his extreme parsimony
and his unusual plainness of face. His wife shared these
characteristics, both facial and temperamental, to the full, and yet
this childless, unprepossessing and eminently economical couple were
absolutely wrapped up in one another; after his death she only lingered
on for three months. Some one commenting on this, said, "They were
certainly the stingiest and probably the ugliest couple in England, yet
their devotion to each other was very beautiful. They could neither of
them bear to part with anything, not even with each other. After his
death she was like a watch that had lost its mainspring." "Surely,"
flashed Lady Constance Leslie, "more like a vessel which had lost her
auxiliary screw." The main characteristic of both Lady Cork and Lady
Constance Leslie's humour was its lightning speed. It is superfluous to
add, with these quick-witted ladies it was never necessary to EXPLAIN
anything, as it is to the majority of English people; they understood
before you had finished saying it.

Many years after, in the late "eighties," Lady Constance Leslie's two
elder daughters, now Mrs. Crawshay and Lady Hope, developed a singular
gift. They could improvise blank verse indefinitely, an