38

-6-
The children had been left home with Phyllis, save little Marion who was and is still in in [sic] Lahevy [?] with some cousins. So from Cambridge we journeyed into East Anglia to see about Roui [?] forebears, as mother has often implored me to do. The baptismal registers there seethe with the name in all spellings, one can almost hear the wails of the babies, but none had sufficient identification to be our great grandfather and all we acquired was knowlegde the ways of vicars, good and bad, of modern grocers signs and words of earl's [illegible] + [and] ancient forts and [illegible], all labelled with the word we sought for. Yet it was good fun, especially when the earl's agent who was helping me, said over the telephone to a friend "the darling duchess was most affable." He really did.

Now at last we are still - as much or least as Phyills let us be. For she is most admirably and artlessly [?] social. Day before yesterday we lunched in a great country house with Lord Methuen - an unhappy man, brooding and ill-at-ease amongst his [illegible], commencing indeed with his own family [illegible] who are also some of them unhappy, as he told me--and yesterday we motored fifty miles to have high tea and it was, at the Shipp Inn at Mere with some who had ridden there cross country.