[331] called on late and introduced as from the United States and very warmly received; could not go on for some time. An evening meeting of Woman Suffrage in London—really good and sensible speaking—Mrs. Fawcett, Miss Beeker, and others, several members of Parliament, but no one of rank as at other meetings . . . . I was asked for the 3rd time to make or second the vote of thanks to the chairman—an inevitable English formality; and I spoke briefly.‘I am struck,’ he wrote,
with the multiplicity of societies and movements here for all sorts of odd things. For instance I have just got a note from a total stranger, inviting me to the platform of a meeting of the society to resist compulsory vaccination by the state! . . . Now as I never even heard of Anti-Vaccination I am rather bewildered, and at any rate can't go. I talked to pretty Mrs. H. who knows the pre-Raphaelite people and confirmed my impression of a very false and artificial vein among them. She knows a set of artists who rendezvous at Hampstead Heath and every evening dress in costumes of the last century and try to get away from the commonplace present; they go so far as to have numbers of Addision's Spectator reprinted with modern dates so as to keep up the atmosphere of Queen Anne's day. This was almost past believing. She knows Burne-Jones well and says he is a very simple person. Dined with the Edwin Arnolds . . . . She was Fanny Channing, a tall, elegant, attractive woman and a most adoring wife of a loving husband. There
