TOO MUCH HOSPITALITY.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVII, Issue 964, 27 August 1908, Page 18

TOO MUCH HOSPITALITY.

Twenty-six teas, dinners and so on, in a little over a month, was what Madame Ada Crossley was looking forward to when she last wrote from London five weeks before her departure for Australia in the Orontes. That does not mean, of course, the total of her meals in that period—one supposes she has three meals a day at least —but the extras thrown in by all sorts and conditions of people anxious to say good-bye in proper form to the Australian contralto who has made herself so popular in Great Britain. The Austral and the Lyceum Clubs had already organised special “At Homes” in her honour, while several other women’s clubs were following suit. Miss Marie Correlli, who boasts that she never gives away a photo, to anybody but her nearest and dearest friends, had included Madame Crossley in that charmed circle and had bidden her to Stratford-on-Avon, there to take a fond farewell. Then again Mr. and Mrs. Henniker-Heaton entertained her at tea on the far-famed terrace of the House of Commons with a debate in the House of Lords to finish up with. It is highly probable that by the time she sailed, the twenty-six functions she wrote about had swelled to nearly double that number, and one can quite understand that now she is revelling in the enforced idleness of shipboard.