In 1850, after the death of their second daughter, Catherine, Gladstone took his wife to Brighton to recruit, and although Mrs. Gladstone looked worn and found it difficult to join in general conversation, she felt as if a great calm had set in “after the storms before.” Two more sons were born, Henry Neville in 1852, and Herbert John[71] in 1854. Thus between 1840 and 1854 Mrs. Gladstone became the mother of eight children, seven of whom survived. While never neglecting her duties as a mother, from the first she studied her husband and sought to secure him the quiet at home which he needed during the Parliamentary Session. He used to say to her, “It is always relief and always delight to see and to be with you.” Her sister Lady Lyttelton gave him the same sense of restfulness; the two sisters were as united after marriage as they had been before, and their close association was only broken by Lady Lyttelton’s death in 1857. Gladstone wrote at the time: “They so drew from their very earliest years and not less since marriage than before it, their breath, so to speak, in common.” Lady Lyttelton left twelve children, and Mrs. Gladstone, despite the cares of her own family, and the rest of her various pre-occupations, never ceased to look after these children as long as they needed her. Mr. Gladstone was the soul of method, neatness, and punctuality; the girl he had married was exactly the reverse, and she used to tease her husband and tell him it was good for him to have an untidy, unmethodical wife, it made him more human. Many stories are told of her delinquencies. It is said that on one occasion when cards of invitation were being sent out for a great party, certain letters of the alphabet were mislaid and ultimately found after the party, hidden in the interstices of a sofa into which they had fallen. The deep offence of those persons who had received no invitation may be better imagined than described. Most of us have known the queer experience of the sudden disappearance of a pencil case or a pair of scissors, when sitting on a chair or sofa of a certain type of upholstery. When Mrs. Gladstone was beginning philanthropic work and had charge of money connected with it, her husband told her that she must have a cash box to keep it in, and must take great care of the key. One day she triumphantly showed him the box with the key carefully fastened on to it! But be it said that where such casual ways would have been harmful to her husband’s interests, she was able to overcome them.