A Group of Noble Dames | Page 3

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A GROUP OF NOBLE DAMES

Contents:
Preface
Part I--Before Dinner
The First Countess of Wessex Barbara of the House of Grebe The
Marchioness of Stonehenge Lady Mottisfont
Part II--After Dinner
The Lady Icenway Squire Petrick's Lady Anna, Lady Baxby The Lady
Penelope The Duchess Of Hamptonshire The Honourable Laura

PREFACE

The pedigrees of our county families, arranged in diagrams on the
pages of county histories, mostly appear at first sight to be as barren of
any touch of nature as a table of logarithms. But given a clue--the
faintest tradition of what went on behind the scenes, and this dryness as
of dust may be transformed into a palpitating drama. More, the careful
comparison of dates alone--that of birth with marriage, of marriage
with death, of one marriage, birth, or death with a kindred marriage,
birth, or death--will often effect the same transformation, and anybody
practised in raising images from such genealogies finds himself
unconsciously filling into the framework the motives, passions, and
personal qualities which would appear to be the single explanation
possible of some extraordinary conjunction in times, events, and
personages that occasionally marks these reticent family records.
Out of such pedigrees and supplementary material most of the

following stories have arisen and taken shape.
I would make this preface an opportunity of expressing my sense of the
courtesy and kindness of several bright-eyed Noble Dames yet in the
flesh, who, since the first publication of these tales in periodicals, six or
seven years ago, have given me interesting comments and conjectures
on such of the narratives as they have recognized to be connected with
their own families, residences, or traditions; in which they have shown
a truly philosophic absence of prejudice in their regard of those
incidents whose relation has tended more distinctly to dramatize than to
eulogize their ancestors. The outlines they have also given of other
singular events in their family histories for use in a second "Group of
Noble Dames," will, I fear, never reach the printing-press through me;
but I shall store them up in memory of my informants' good nature.
T. H. June 1896.

DAME