And only the other evening I sat at dinner next to the Dowager Countess. Heavens! what a beautiful creature she still is, with her prematurely white hair and her long thick neck!
And after dinner we talked of Barty—she with that delightful frankness that always characterized her through life, I am told:
“Dear Barty Josselin! how desperately in love I was with that man, to be sure! Everybody was—he might have thrown the handkerchief as he pleased in Riffrath, I can tell you, Sir Robert! He was the handsomest man I ever saw, and wore a black pork-pie hat and a little yellow Vandyck beard and mustache; just the color of Turkish tobacco, like his hair! All that sounds odd now, doesn’t it? Fashions have changed—but not for the better! And what a figure! and such fun he was! and always in such
