To-day, when there are so many American women adorning high places and filling more or less leading _rôles_ in British society, it is difficult to realize that only a little more than a quarter of a century ago there was a strong movement afoot, among certain leaders of that society, to exclude their fair transatlantic cousins from London drawing-rooms. As to the oft-recurring Anglo-American marriage, while there are yet many people who look askance upon any sort of an international alliance, that prejudice that frowned so ominously upon it some years ago has wonderfully abated on both sides of the water. The Queen herself recently confessed that she had regarded it at one time as rather a hazardous experiment, but realizing that, with her broad education and elastic temperament, the American girl adapts herself to a new environment with a facility which would scarcely be possible to the less flexible English girl, Her Majesty's apprehensions have been gradually allayed. One of the first American women before whom these later-day barriers of social prejudice gave way was Miss Jennie Jerome, of New York. As the wife of Lord Randolph Churchill, and ably championed by his mother the Duchess of Marlborough, she penetrated the innermost recesses of British society, opening the way more than any other woman to the position her countrywomen occupy there at the end of the century, and holding herself a place second to that of no other American woman in Europe. The admiration she attracted as a young girl, the wonderful part she played in the life of her husband and is at present playing in the lives of her sons, the unusual influence she has undeniably exercised in English politics, the intimate contact into which the events of her life have from time to time thrown her with the crowned heads of Europe,--the Czar of Russia, the Emperor of Germany, and the Queen of England,--have all tended to give her a unique place in the history of the latter days of the Victorian era. In England there is no woman below the royal family whose name and personality are so generally known as Lady Randolph Churchill's. Her prominent identification with the Primrose League has carried her fame into the colonies and into India. Many people in Russia and Germany follow her career with keen interest, the press of both countries bringing her frequently before the public, and even in self-centred France the women of the aristocracy, in imitation of her political achievements, have from time to time essayed to "jouer la Lady Randolph Churchill." She is the eldest of three daughters of the late Mr. Leonard Jerome, and was born in Brooklyn, on the 9th of January, 1854. There and in New York she passed her early childhood.