individual she wrote to me:--

"I thought I should never be introduced to him, and I had to wait
100 years, but everything is possible in the best of worlds, and he
was very satisfactory at last." Satisfactory! No word could be more
characteristic on the pen of Lady Dorothy. To be "satisfactory,"
whether you were the President of the French Republic or Lord
Wolseley or the Human Elephant (a pathetic freak in whom she took a
great interest), was to perform on the stage of life, in her
unruffled presence, the part which you had been called upon by
Providence to fill. Even a criminal might be "satisfactory" if he
did his job thoroughly. The only entirely unsatisfactory people
were those who were insipid, conventional, and empty. "The first
principle of society should be to extinguish the bores," she once
said. I remember going with her to the Zoo in 1898, and being
struck with a remark which she made, not because it was important,
but because it was characteristic. We were looking at the wolves
which she liked; and then, close by, she noticed some kind of
Indian cow. "What a bore for the wolves to have to live opposite a
cow!" and then, as if talking to herself, "I do hate a ruminant!"

Her relations to literature, art, and science were spectacular
also. She was a sympathetic and friendly onlooker, always on the
side of those things against the Philistines, but not affecting
special knowledge herself. She was something of a virtuoso. She
once said, "I have a passion for reading, but on subjects which
nobody else will touch," and this indicated the independence of her
mind. She read to please herself, and to satisfy her thirst for
experience. When our friendship began, Zola was in the act of
producing the tremendous series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. It
was one of our early themes of conversation. Zola was then an
object of shuddering horror to the ordinary English reader. Lady
Dorothy had already read _L'Assommoir_, and had not shrunk from it;
so I ventured to tell her of _La Terre_, which was just appearing.
She wrote to me about it: "I have been reading Zola. He takes the
varnish off rural life, I must say. Oh! these horrid demons of
Frenchmen know how to write. Even the most disgusting things they
know how to describe poetically. I wish Zola cou