Page 290 - Life of Gertrude Bell

264 GERTRUDE BELL
He added most truthfully that ‘if ever anyone did, Gertrude
warmed herself through and through at the fires of life!* But it
was Dr Hogarth’s sister Janet who bridged the years. In 1928,
just before their own deaths, Gertrude’s parents went to represent
her at Oxford when Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth received the
D.B.E. from the Duchess of York. Janet Courtney was there
too and she recalled the carefree days when the two young women
walked together ‘in that Oxford garden among the roses and the
scarlet robes ... Gertrude was gone but two years before in that
blazing Iraq summer ... Time couldn’t touch her, though she
made so little effort to escape him.’