Each return home brought experiences of a different kind. 'I have known,' he says, 'everyone worth knowing from 1850 to my death.' At seven years old he was seeing and hearing the famous persons of that time, either at the home in Sloane Street, to which Wentworth Dilke's connection with the Exhibition drew men eminent in the world of physical science and industrial enterprise, as well as the artists with whom his connoisseurship brought him into touch; or else at old Mr. Dilke's house in Lower Grosvenor Place. He remembered visits with his grandfather to Gore House, 'before Soyer turned it into the Symposium,' and to Lady Morgan's. The brilliant little Irishwoman was a familiar friend, and her pen, of bog-oak and gold, the gift to her of the Irish people, came at last to lie among the treasures of 76, Sloane Street. Also there remained with him "memories from about 1851 of the bright eyes of little Louis Blanc, of Milner-Gibson's pleasant smile, of Bowring's silver locks, of Thackeray's tall stooping figure, of Dickens's goatee, of Paxton's white hat, of Barry Cornwall and his wife, of Robert Stephenson the engineer, to whom I wanted to be bound apprentice, of Browning (then known as 'Mrs. Browning's husband'), of Joseph Cooke (another engineer), of Cubitt the builder (one of the promoters of the Exhibition), of John Forster the historian, of the Redgraves, and of that greater painter, John Martin. Also of the Rowland Hills, at Hampstead. "1859 was the height of my rage for our South Kensington Trap-Bat Club, which I think had invented the name South Kensington. It was at it that I first met Emilia Francis Strong. We played in the garden of Gore House where the Conservatory of the Horticultural Society, behind the Albert Hall, was afterwards built." In the memoir of the second Lady Dilke, prefixed to _The Book of the Spiritual Life_, Sir Charles writes of this time, 1859 to 1860, when he "loved to be patronized by her, regarding her with the awe of a hobbledehoy of sixteen or seventeen towards a beautiful girl of nineteen or twenty." But at one point she bewildered him; for in those days Emilia Strong was devout to the verge of fanaticism: "We were all puzzled by the apparent conflict between the vitality and the impish pranks of the brilliant student, expounding to us the most heterodox of social views, and the 'bigotry' which we seemed to discern when we touched her spiritual side." [Footnote: _Book of the Spiritual Life_, Memoir, p. 10.] No doubt the fastings and mortifications which Emilia Strong practised at that period of her youth would seem 'bigotry' to a lad brought up under influences which, in so far as theology entered into them, had an Evangelical bent. Charles Dilke thus summed up his early prepossessions and practices in this respect: