Page:Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906.djvu/278

WIVES OF THE PRIME MINISTERS small family. All this tended to make them concentrate their affection upon each other and ask very little of outsiders, and when the long illness began of which Lady Campbell-Bannerman died, her husband's daily and hourly devotion was touching to see. He relied implicitly on her judgment, having, as he said, so often found it reliable and shrewd. It was well for both that their mutual confidence was so close, for during and after the South African War a storm of abuse and unpopularity raged round Sir Henry, who was opposed both to the war itself and the manner in which it was conducted. No unpopularity, however, caused him to swerve in any degree, and it was often thought that his wife had a great deal to say in the maintenance of his uncompromising course. Certain it is that she shared his convictions to the full. In both they were founded in the deepest and most abiding sentiments.

They shared also the same taste in friends, with something like an oblivion of social standing and a great intolerance for pretension or pose or insincerity, more marked perhaps in the wife than in the husband. Lady Campbell-Bannerman was very proud of a strain of Dutch in her descent, but her every trait showed 238