Page:Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906.djvu/224

WIVES OF THE PRIME MINISTERS Brighton to recruit, and although Mrs. Gladstone looked worn and found it difficult to join in general conversation, she felt as if a great calm had set in "after the storms before."

Two more sons were born, Henry Neville in 1852, and Herbert John in 1854. Thus between 1840 and 1854 Mrs. Gladstone became the mother of eight children, seven of whom survived. While never neglecting her duties as a mother, from the first she studied her husband and sought to secure him the quiet at home which he needed during the Parliamentary Session. He used to say to her, "It is always relief and always delight to see and to be with you." Her sister Lady Lyttelton gave him the same sense of restfulness; the two sisters were as united after marriage as they had been before, and their close association was only broken by Lady Lyttelton's death in 1857. Gladstone wrote at the time: "They so drew from their very earliest years and not less since marriage than before it, their breath, so to speak, in common." Lady Lyttelton left twelve children, and Mrs. Gladstone, despite the cares of her own family, and the rest of her various pre-occupations, never ceased to look 188