The mother ruled her household as Victorian mothers did, and spared neither pains nor expense for her son’s ambitions and her daughters’ proper advancement in the world; she welcomed their friends with courteous Irish welcome, however little many of their tastes might be in harmony with her own; but she let them talk unmolested and was content to keep her own counsel, while she ministered lavishly to their creature comforts; and the father--a man of few words but of strong character and clear insight--kept his own views undisturbed. He had nevertheless more deeply, though probably unconsciously, impressed them on his children, than his children then guessed. He was a broad Liberal, and it is interesting to note that, in days when we were even more insular than we are now, no fighter in the cause of freedom was forbidden his house because he was a foreigner. Under the auspices of Mr. Adam Gielgud--the son of a great Polish refugee--patriots from many lands who had sought our shelter, found their way to that hospitable roof. Pulski and Riciotti Garibaldi are the only other names that recur to me, but there were more and they were all welcome. Men of after note in the art world and in journalism came also as friends of Joe’s or of his sister’s--shaken together with charming Irish and hard-headed North country cousins. Many were the times when dinner had been ordered for six, and sixteen would sit down at the long mahogany table, the polishing of which Mrs. Carr supervised daily, laden with homely but abundant fare. But Joe made many other friends in town who never found time to visit Clapham. In spite of his recent appointment as dramatic critic to _The Echo_ his new friends were less among actors than among painters--Burne-Jones and perhaps chiefest just then, Rossetti, whose friendship he describes himself in _Some Eminent Victorians_. Nevertheless he had met Henry Irving through the son of the Lyceum manager, Mr. Bateman, and had often passionately praised him. To the girl fresh from the small English colony abroad it was all vastly entertaining, though I did not realize then how much of a figure my betrothed already was among the men of his time. Even the gayer part of my girlhood--the summers spent at S. Moritz, which my father had discovered, as a homely village in his yearly Alpine tramp--bore little resemblance to London excitements. I had but rarely seen the inside of a theatre and never a fine English actor, and my first vision of Henry Irving in “The Bells,” is a haunting memory still. This was in July, 1873. But this engrossing first season of mine had to be interrupted; for Joe, having at last obtained a commission from one of the dailies for holiday articles which would bring in a sum just sufficient to pay his expenses, was whirled off to the Engadine by my brother to be introduced to my parents as my suitor.