Whether her ancestor the prince or her ancestress the actress made her development possible, whether her Connecticut grandfather or her Virginia grandmother taught her, how much she owed her bandit father who defied the world and her mother, the nun, who won it--both for love--who shall say? When I look back on those wonderful months I find that the fanciful sprite whose province it is to tint imperishably the choice pictures that shall brighten the last grey days, has selected for my gallery not those hours when the footlights stretched between us, though one would suppose them beyond all doubt the most brilliant, but quaint, unexpected bits, sudden, unrehearsed scenes that stand out like tiny, jewelled landscapes viewed through a reversed telescope, or white sudden statues at the end of a dark corridor. There is that delicious afternoon when we went, she and I and Sue Paynter and an infatuated undergrad, to Oxford together, and ate strawberries and hot buttered tea-cake and extraordinary little buns choked with plums, and honey breathing of clover and English meadows, and drank countless cups of strong English tea with blobs of yellow, frothing cream atop. Heavens, how we ate, and how we talked, and how tolerantly the warm, grey walls, ivy-hung and statue-niched, smiled through the long, opal English sunset at our frivolous and ephemeral chatter! They have listened to so much, those walls, and we shall perish and wax old as a garment, and still the tea and strawberries shall brew and bloom along the emerald turf, and infatuated youths shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice of their charmer. Not the pyramids themselves give me that sense of the continuity of the generations, the ebb and flow of youth and youth's hot loves and hot regrets and the inexorable twilight that makes placid middle age, as do those grey walls and blooming closes of what I sometimes think is the very heart's core of England. My mother's countrymen may fill London with their national caravanseries and castles with their nation's lovely (if somewhat nasal) daughters, but Oxford shall defy them forever. The infatuated undergrad was the owner of a banjo, an instrument hitherto unknown to Margarita and in regard to which she was vastly curious, and at her request he and three of his mates blushingly sang for her some of the American negro melodies then so popular among them. She was delighted with them and soon began to hum and croon unconsciously, the velvet of her voice mingling most piquantly with their sweet throaty English singing. By little and little her tones swelled louder and more bell-like: theirs softened gradually, till the harmony, so simple, yet so inevitable, dwindled to the nearest echo and barely breathed the quaint, primitive words: _"Nellie was a lady-- Last night she died ..."_