by Lady Cynthia Asquith, [London, James Barrie, 1952] describes the author's "Edwardian Girlhood," her "Coming Out" and her life growing up in the first half of the last century.

 John Singer Sargent.  Detail.  The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant.

You can get lost in all the connections sometimes, the way everything seems to converge.  Lady Cynthia was the daughter of Mary Lady Elcho (seated, left), wife of Hugo Richard Charteris, Lord Elcho and after 1914, the Earl of Wemyss and March.  Lady Cynthia married Herbert Asquith in 1910; to supplement her husband's income during the War she was secretary to J.M. Barrie, author of "Peter Pan;" she also became close friends with D.H. Lawrence (to whom she devotes a chapter of her memoir) and the writer L.P. Hartley ("The Go-Between").

The Wyndham Sisters and their illustrious family have appeared before in these pages.  Mrs. Tennant (seated, right) was the mother of the Bright Young Thing, Stephen Tennant, friend of Cecil Beaton.  And so on.

The 20 March issue of the London Review of Books has a review of R.J.Q. Adams' biography of Arthur Balfour, with whom Mary Lady Elcho had a secret affair.  In the same issue of the LRB Colm Toibin has a very interesting article, "The Art of Being Found Out," which looks at duplicity, secrecy and the need to reveal those secrets in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras.  Talk about synchronicity!

None of which is what I sat down this morning to tell you, however, and it is this constant digressing of mine, this meandering and explaining of the intricate (dull?  inconsequential?) linking and interconnectedness that keeps  distracting me and why I have just got to move on.  To what, I don't know yet; perhaps 1905.

And I haven't even gotten to all your kind and informative remarks on the Pughs and Pillows of yesterday.

Anyway, what I wanted to tell you: in her memoir Lady Cynthia tells about all the famous people like Balfour who came down to visit her mother Mary Lady Elcho at Stanway House and the games they would play, including things like Charades and I Spy.  But her favorite game was one "in which two people, conversing as though they had just met in Hades, impersonated a pair of famous characters, say, Cleopatra and Martin Luther, or Marat and Jane Austen; and any of the audience who guessed their assumed identities joined in the conversation."

Now as you know, having played this very game, I ask you: can you imagine playing with these people?  Can you imagine what fun?