of "Young Souls" which comprised as its members Lady Marjorie and Lady Violet Manners, Miss Cicely Horner, Miss Violet Asquith, and Miss Viola Tree. Violet was close to Winston Churchill, promoted to the Liberal Cabinet in 1908: Churchill said later they were "practically engaged", and they were friends for life. He actually became engaged that year to Clementine Hozier, whom Violet thought "as stupid as an owl". In late August, between his engagement and his marriage, Churchill spent a holiday with the Asquith family at New Slains Castle on the Scottish coast. Some days after his departure, but while Arnold Ward remained a guest, Violet went out one evening, to look for a book left on the rocks. She was discovered after a search of several hours, lying uninjured but unconscious near the coastal path. Michael Shelden suggests Violet's experience may have been "an unhappy young woman's cry for attention". Violet became engaged to Archibald Gordon (Archie), son of John Hamilton-Gordon, 1st Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair and his wife Ishbel in 1909, after he had had a car accident and was on what became his deathbed. 1910–1914 Violet travelled to the Sudan, where her brother Arthur was in the civil service. On her return to the United Kingdom, she found that her good friend Olive MacLeod, sister of Flora MacLeod, had lost her fiancé Boyd Alexander, killed in Africa. Under Violet's influence, Olive played the part of a widow. She then travelled to visit Alexander's grave. In May 1912 Violet accompanied her father and step-mother on a Mediterranean cruise, aboard the HMS Enchantress, with a party comprising mainly Churchill, members of his family, and his political entourage including Edward Marsh, but also Louis of Battenberg. That year she acquired a long-term correspondent, Matthew Nathan. In March 1913 she met Rupert Brooke, at a dinner given by Marsh to celebrate Brooke's Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, with W. B. Yeats, Clementine Churchill and Cynthia Asquith. She was the chosen confidante of Marsh after Brooke's death in 1915. Violet made an effort to befriend Ottoline Morrell, in 1913. Her house in Bedford Square offered conversation with Henry James, Wyndham Lewis and Desmond MacCarthy. Morrell found her own conversation dazzling rather than profound. World War I On 16 January 1915, the ageing Henry James visited the Asquiths at Walmer Castle in Kent. Violet Asquith and her half-sister Elizabeth saw James's lapidary but