I remember her quite well when I was your age; she was known then as the beautiful Lady Merryone, and Society was divided into two parties, one of which declared that she was the most beautiful woman in England, and the other that Mrs. Palsgrave was. Their photographs were in all the shop windows, and their portraits in every Academy, and fashions were named after them. There was the Palsgrave toque and the Merryone bolero, and everything they did was chronicled in the papers, just as if it mattered. Each tried to outdo the other, and Mrs. Palsgrave, who had the most beautiful feet you ever saw out of marble, went to an historical fancy-ball as Cleopatra, and her feet were absolutely bare. Her portrait was afterwards painted in the costume, but it was hung at the salon, as it was considered too indecent for the Academy. And what a sensation it was when Mr. Palsgrave blew his brains out in the height of a London Season, and left so many debts that Mrs. Palsgrave to get rid of them went on the stage, where a Serene Highness saw her and fell in love with her, and married her. They say you wouldn't recognise her now, she has changed so; she lives somewhere in Germany and is as grey as a badger and as red as a lobster and bloated with beer. But Eleanora, Countess of Merryone, is still to the fore. Merryone, who was old enough to be her grandfather, died of a fit of jealousy; then she turned Roman Catholic and went into a convent, but it sounds better in books than it is in practice, and she came out again in six months and married a Bishop within a year of Merryone's death, and buried him within another year. She has been a Primrose Dame and a Temperance lecturer and a Theosophist, and kept a stud at Newmarket, and edited a daily, and started for the North Pole but turned back at Iceland, and now she has married this boy. And she isn't a lunatic at large, but a woman who ought to have borne children, and had cares and anxieties. {_Disguising Age_} It makes me feel quite old, when I think of her and Mrs. Palsgrave, and see all the changes of the last eighteen years. But I won't think of time and the Burial Service yet awhile. I saw Valmond in Piccadilly to-day, and I believe I could catch him myself if I tried, for I haven't got a grey hair, at least Thérèse manages to hide them; and I haven't got a moustache, and my eyes haven't got wrinkles round the corners, and my neck hasn't begun to shrink. I am only thirty-five, Elizabeth, and a Society belle's star sets late.--Your dearest Mamma. LETTER XIX CLARIDGE'S HOTEL, LONDON 16th September DARLING ELIZABETH: {_L'Affaire Colorado_}