BALFOUR'S HEROINE

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 118, 21 May 1930, Page 16

BALFOUR'S HEROINE

GIRL WHO COULD NOT COOK

I -went back 80 years in time to find the heroine in Jiction best loved by the late Earl of Balfour, says a writer in thD "Daily Mail." He once confessed to Commander O. Locker-Lampson, M.P., that she was Hildegarde, the heroine of "The Initials," and I found her in three duodecimo volumes published in 1850. The authoress, who has long been forgotten, was Jemima Montgomery, a fascinating Irishwoman of County Donegal who married Baron yon Tautphoeus, Court Chamberlain tc the King of Bavaria. It is a living, humorous book. The hero, like Lord Balfour, was a Scot, and the languid Arthur Balfour of the faroffi Cambridge days may not have f6Jt the less attracted to him because that hero thought were few things so disagreeable as going to bed, excepting, perhaps, getting up again. But the heroiino dominates the book, from one of her first glances at young Hamilton, the hero, "which might appropriately have accompanied a box on the ear," and her description of him to her sister, which he overhears, as "an effeminate-looking, superciliouß boy." A POOK SECOND SON. She is a charming creature, and not above confessing, after making a trial, that she finds the details of domestic life "not only tiresome but actually disgusting to me." And yet, when she learns that Hamilton is a second son and poor, she assures him that she will find domestic work interesting. "Why," she says, laughing, "I really feel as if I could even learn to cook." She "does not think it necessary for a man to be ha.ndsome," and she confessed to Mile. Hortense that she "rather thought she should like a man of whom she' could be afraid." Did these traits attract Lord Balfour to her? Or was it the very human way in which, after defeating the hero to the very last chapter of the book, he, leaning out of the window in exasperated fury, suddenly turns to,find that "she was crying as heartily as could be desired of any girl of her age." An so she becomes Mrs. Hamilton, and, as in all good old-fusluoncd stories, they have lots of children and live happily; eror after.