Page 34 - Life of Gertrude Bell

Europe and London

In November and the first few days of December 1888 tea and
dinner engagements occupy much of Gertrude’s diary and
letters. At the age of twenty she was a confident and welcome
figure in society and she was often in the company of the Russells
and Stanleys, the impulsive and learned Mrs J. R. Green who
completed her husband’s Short History of the English People after
his death, and the Norman Grosvenors — the son of Lord Ebury
and daughter of James Stuart Worsley. Meanwhile there were
daily visits from her ‘fitter’ as she assembled her wardrobe for
the first big journey abroad. In the often quoted words of her
aunt Lady Mary Lascelles, whose husband was now Minister at
Bucharest, a European tour would help cto get rid of her Oxfordy
manner’. There was certainly something of the blue-stocking
about her at this time, though she was saved from the more
insufferable aspects of that condition by her natural ebullience
and vivacity.
She left London with her father in the second week of Decem­
ber carrying in her luggage eleven volumes of Dumas loaned to
her by Mr Grosvenor. In Paris she parted from her father and was
escorted on the train to Bucharest by the Lascelles’s eldest son
Billy, with whom she had already conducted a mild and inter­
mittent flirtation. The journey, described in long and colourful
letters to friends and family, was a triumphant passage through
the baroque palaces and fun-loving cities of central Europe in
that interval of relative peace between the Franco-Prussian War
and the later aberrations of the German empire.
From Vienna she reported that they had taken Billy’s younger
brother Gerald aboard the train at Munich and were enjoying
themselves immensely. They arrived in Bucharest in time for