She had written to a friend, saying, in
effect,
What on earth did you mean by not telling me more about your cousin,
Lady Strachey? She turns out to be one of the most delightful people I
have ever met, and yet you never breathed a word about her. Why did you
want to keep her to yourself? Through your selfishness I have missed
three or four weeks of her.
It is notoriously difficult to describe charm, and I shall make no
attempt, except to say that my mother's spell did not consist in good
looks in the ordinary sense of the word. She had a witching expression,
an exceedingly graceful carriage of her head and body, and a good
figure; but her face was so mobile and so entirely governed by her smile
that photographs and pictures were always pronounced as "impossible" and
"utterly unlike."
Though she was in no sense nervous, the attempt to sit for her picture
seemed at once to break the spell and destroy that "_beau regard_"
which was, I feel sure, the secret of the pleasure she spread around
her. No doubt she took trouble to please, but she had the art of
concealing her art. No one ever criticised her as "theatrical" or
"artificial."
Her children fully felt her charm.
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