ABSTRACT
It was a big house with plenty of rooms for guests and several public ones, their favourite being a kind of library called the Green Room. It was the kind of house that people did not want to leave. Tom Spring-Rice spoke for hundreds when he wrote to Jelly: 'You are right, there's not a house in London where she always find so warm, so affectionate a welcome as io, Netherton Grove.' Warmth, generosity, was the source of all Adila's actions. She paid accounts-and ten years later bills for house alterations were still being presented. She was a unique boon to the two-indeed the three-unpractical musicians at Netherton Grove; and when she went out of it, they decided they could have no one to replace her. When Adrienne was small, if Adila were ill in bed as she frequently was, Jelly would not leave the house, because she was needed to clown for her little niece.
