Americans -- Italy -- Fiction; Rome (Italy) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Upper class -- Fiction
So I led her up to Dame Edith Steuert, Mrs. Edith Foster Prichard
Steuert, author of Far From Thy Ways, I Strayed, the greatest hymn since
Newman's. Daughter, wife, sister, what not, of clergymen, she lived in
the most exciting currents of Anglicanism. Her conversation ran on
vacant livings and promising young men from Shropshire, and on the
editorials in the latest _St. Georges Banner_ and _The Anglican Cry_.
She sat on platforms and raised subscriptions and got names. She seemed
to be forever surrounded by a ballet of curates and widows who at her
word, rose and swayed and passed the scones. For she was the author of
the greatest hymn of modern times and gazing at her one wondered when
the mood could have struck this loud conceited woman, the mood that had
prompted those eight verses of despair and humility. The hymn could have
been written by Cowper, that gentle soul exposed to the flame of an
evangelism too hot even for negroes. For one minute in her troubled
girlhood all the intermittent sincerity of generations of clergymen must
have combined in her, and late at night, full of dejections she could
not understand, she must have committed to her diary that heartbroken
confession. Then the fit was over, and over for ever. It was a telling
example of that great mystery in religious and artistic experience: the
occasional profundity of nobodies. Dame Edith Steuert on being
presented, straightened visibly to show that she was not impressed by
the title. With a candor that was another surprise, Alix asked her if
she might use her name as reference on her nephew's application for
entrance into Eton College. To be sure the nephew was in Lyons, but if
Dame Edith would permit the Princess to call upon her some afternoon she
would bring some of the boy's letters, photographs and sufficient
apparatus to convince her that he was a student recommendable. Friday
afternoon was agreed upon, and the Princess rejoined me for new
introductions.
So it went on for an hour. The Princess had no method; each new
encounter was a new problem. Within three minutes the meeting became an
acquaintance, and the acquaintance a friendship. Little did the new
friends guess how strange it was to her. She kept asking me what their
husbands "did." It delighted her to think that their husbands did
anything; she had never guessed that one could meet such people and
smiled amazedly like a girl about to meet a real printed poet. A
doctor's wife, the wife of a man in rubber, fancy.... Toward the end of
the afternoon her enthusiasm waned. I feel a little dusty, she
whispered. I feel very Bovary. To think that all this has been going on
in Rome without my knowing it. I'll go and say goodbye to Mme.
Agaropoulos,--_tiens_, who is that beautiful lady. That is an American,
isn't it? Quick.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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