Of the external appearance of London I do not mean to say much, since after all it has not changed in its essentials, except perhaps in the suburbs. Probably the modern reader, if he could be transported back there, would find the most unsightly aspect of it the advertisements which, before sky-writing was properly understood and developed, used to be written up on board and blank walls, as they are now on shop windows. I should like to see him cross the street on the level of the traffic, as we used to have to do in those days! But of course we did not need to cross the street so often, when we were allowed to move in either direction on either pavement: and only a few of the more crowded pavements had been mobilized, so that you could ordinarily look into a shop window while standing still. The shops themselves, before the London Improvement Act, had grown to an enormous size: they used to tell an irreverent story of a very ungodly young gentleman who died while shopping at Selfridge’s, and for quite a long time afterwards could not be persuaded that he had got further than the basement! But I should weary my readers if I prosed on about all the changes I have seen since then: after all, you can see London as it was in the forties in plenty of old prints and history-books.
Those were happy days in my life, though I had not yet found my two great sources of happiness, of which you shall hear later. I suppose I must have had my good looks, for I was filmed among the Society beauties of the day, but only, I think, when they were getting rather hard up for material! My business was prospering, and I had no cause to regret, as I have never since had cause to regret, my purchase of Greylands. And if at times the ambition to write or to come before the world as a public figure visited me in my dreams, it was only to be put on one side. Some women, they say, lose their ambitions with matrimony; for myself, I think it has always been quite otherwise, and it was chiefly the desire to show my husband that I was worthy of his love, and to give him a name and an importance in Society, that later made me look to a political career as the proper sphere for the exercise of my poor capacities.