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stamped letters containing very formal tea or dinner invitations to their parents, the gardener, or the governess. Florence, emerging from the house in response to one of these invitations, in her very best evening gown and with diamonds in her hair, had found the children waiting to wheel her to the shed in a goat cart. On the way to the Wigwam they upset the cart onto the gravel but Florence, though scratched and dirtied, stayed on heroically through the afternoon programme, not only demonstrating her good nature but also providing a fine example of social poise.
    Another invitation invited “Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Bell to tea on Saturday August 13, 1892, at 5 pm” and added “RSVP.” Florence, much teased by the children for her French accent, had accepted along similar lines. “To Monsieur and Mesdames de Viguevamme, Red Barns, Coatham, Redcar” she wrote, “The Marchioness de Sidesplitters will have much pleasure in dining this evening with Mr. Prinketty, Miss Fiddlesticks, and Miss Pizzicato at 7:30,” and—probably anxious not to sacrifice another evening dress—she had added: “She regrets that the unfortunate delicate state of her health will not permit her to wear on this occasion her Court dress and feathers or to powder her hair.”
    Entertaining and tolerant as Florence could be, she was rigorousabout behaviour. She was forever writing essays with titles such as “The Minor Moralist” or “Si Jeunesse Voulait” (“If Only the Young Would . . .”). Her rules concerning good manners were not negotiable, whether she was ticking off a waiting coachman who had left his driving seat to shelter from the rain, or a child who had failed to greet guests correctly. Manners, she insisted, were as important for ourselves as for others. She might have been repeating a conversation with an older Gertrude when she wrote: “However valuable the intellectual wares you may have to offer, it is obvious that if your method of calling your fellow man’s attention to them is to give him a slap in the face at the same time, you will probably not succeed in enlisting his kindly interest in your future achievements.”
    The impatient Gertrude had some difficulty with all of this. To her, a conversation was about finding out something or telling someone something. She could not feel very interested, she may well have retorted, in her fellow man’s assessment of her achievements. But there were times when Florence was entirely on Gertrude’s wavelength, as in her deploring “the tendency displayed by many otherwise reasonable people to believe that their own race is of quite peculiar interest, their own family traits the most worthy of note, the school they have been to the only possible one, the quarter of London they live in the most agreeable, and their own house the best in it”; it was “an insidious peril to be striven against.” Half English and half Irish herself, she was sensitive to the kind of slur that commonly figured in
Punch
cartoons about the French, their habits, hygiene, food, and morals, all of which she knew in many cases to be superior to those of the British. This climate of receptiveness to other standards and ways of life was the best initiation to travel that Gertrude could have absorbed in her childhood. Later in life, she was to take it to its logical conclusion—and far further than Florence could ever have intended.
    â€œCorrect” as had been Florence’s upbringing, the cosmopolitan society to which she had been exposed before her marriage to Hugh Bell had plunged her into an intellectual and artistic milieu that she would probably not have encountered if she had been brought up in England. Not until Edward VII came to the throne were actresses and artists and newly moneyed merchants routinely included in aristocratic circles, unless under the particular freedoms implied by patronage. Florence was to