She lived a life of hectic gaiety.
It can only be described in a hackneyed phrase, because it was a hackneyed thing.
The British public in its odd way took her to its heart and Lady Betty was a sufficient description of her throughout the British islands.
Women mobbed her when she went to a wedding and the gallery applauded her at first nights as though she were a popular actress.
Girls copied the way she did her hair and manufacturers of soap and face cream paid her money to use her photograph to advertise their wares.
Of course dull, stodgy people, the people who remembered and regretted the old order, disapproved of her.
They sneered at her constant appearance in the limelight.
They said she had an insane passion for self-advertisement.
They said she was fast.
They said she drank too much.
They said she smoked too much.
I will admit that nothing I had heard of her had predisposed me to think very well of her.
I held cheap the women who seemed to look upon the war as an occasion to enjoy themselves and be talked about.
I am bored by the papers in which you see photographs of persons in society walking in Cannes or playing golf at St Andrews.
I have always found the Bright Young People extremely tedious.
The gay life seems dull and stupid to the onlooker, but the moralist is unwise to judge it harshly.
It is as absurd to be angry with the young things who lead it as with a litter of puppies scampering aimlessly around, rolling one another over and chasing their tails.
It is well to bear it with fortitude if they cause havoc in the flower beds or break a piece of china.
Some of them will be drowned because their points are not up to the mark and the rest will grow up into well-behaved dogs.
Their unruliness is due only to the vitality of youth.
And it was vitality that was Betty's most shining characteristic.
The urge of life flowed through her with a radiance that dazzled you.
I do not think I shall ever forget the impression she made on me at the party at which I first saw her.
She was like a maenad.
She danced with an abandon that made you laugh, so obvious was her intense enjoyment of the music and the movement of her young limbs.
Her hair was brown, slightly disordered by the vigour of her gestures, but her eyes were deep blue, and her skin was milk and roses.
She was a great beauty, but she had none of the coldness of great beauty.
She laughed constantly and when she was not laughing she smiled and her eyes danced with the joy of living.
She was like a milkmaid on the farmstead of the gods.
She had the strength and health of the people; and yet the independence of her bearing, a sort of noble frankness of carriage, suggested the great lady.
I do not quite know how to put the feeling she gave me, that though so simple and unaffected she was not unconscious of her station.
I fancied that if occasion arose she could get on her dignity and be very grand indeed.
She was charming to everybody because, probably without being quite aware of it, in the depths of her heart she felt that the rest of the world was perfectly insignificant.
I understood why the factory girls in the East End adored her and why half a million people who had never seen her except in a photograph looked upon her with the intimacy of personal friendship.
I was introduced to her and she spent a few minutes talking to me.
It was extraordinarily flattering to see the interest she showed in you; you knew she could not really be so pleased to meet you as she seemed or so delighted with what you said, but it was very attractive.
She had the gift of being able to jump over the first difficult phases of acquaintance and you had not known her for five minutes before you felt you had known her all her life.
She was snatched away from me by someone who wanted to dance with her and she surrendered herself to her partner's arms with just the same eager happiness as she had shown when she sank into a chair by my side.
I was surprised when I met her at luncheon a fortnight later to find that she remembered exactly what we had talked about during those noisy ten minutes at the dance.
A young woman with all the social graces.
I mentioned the incident to Carruthers.
'She was no fool,' he said.
'Very few people knew how intelligent she was.
She wrote some very good poetry.
Because she was so gay, because she was so reckless and never cared a damn for anybody, people thought she was scatterbrained.
Far from it.
She was as clever as a monkey.
You would never have thought she'd had the time to read all the things she had.
I don't suppose anyone knew that side of her as well as I did.
We used to take walks together, in the country at week-ends, and in London we'd drive out to Richmond Park and walk there, and talk.