I THINK it was during that second season I spent in London while living in Munich that I met Lady Randolph Churchill... The first time I lunched at her house she was standing near the head of the stairs when I arrived, with a rather short round-faced good-looking youth — as I assumed him to be — beside her. 'My son,' she said. 'Which one?' I asked. 'Why! Winston — of course!' He was a Member of Parliament and the most discussed young man in England, but he did not look a day over twenty.
I sat beside him at table, and found conversation with him increasingly difficult. He seemed to me to grow sulkier and sulkier. . . . When we went up to the drawing-room young Churchill was obliged to leave at once for the House. 'Good-bye,' he said to me sulkily. Then, as he was making his exit, he turned and scowled. 'I've read your books and admired them, but that is more than you can say of mine.' And he went out and slammed the door behind him.
So that was it!
I went from Mrs. West's to the house of Mrs. John Hall. . . . I told her of my rencontre with young Winston. 'I had no idea he had written anything,' I said. 'Of course he was put out because I didn't mention his books. Authors!'
'Oh, but you should read them,' she exclaimed, 'The River War, London to Ladysmith, Ian Hamilton's March. They are really distinguished works.'
And so they were, as I soon found to my enjoyment.
From Gertrude Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist (1932), pp. 381-382.