thinks of herself, and is "really the most forgiving person in the world, in forgiving slights." She is overcome by the spring weather,—[1]
"Primavera, I think the Italians call it. * * * It makes
me sigh perpetually; but then I am so sensitive. Dear Lady
Cumnor used to say I was like a thermometer."
But it is in her association with Lady Harriet that her
sincerity and candor shine forth. Apprised, on one occasion,
of the intention of that personage—an aristocrat in
character as well as social station—to honor her with a
morning call, she dispatches to a neighbor her stepdaughter
Molly, of whose friendship with Lady Harriet she is
jealous, and keeps at home her own daughter Cynthia, to
prepare the especially delicious luncheon to which the
guest is to be invited as an impromptu bit of pot-luck.
During this visit Lady Harriet brings up the question of
white lies, confessing to an occasional indulgence, and asking
her hostess if she never yielded to the temptation. She
is answered:[2]
"I should have been miserable if I ever had. I should have
died of self-reproach. 'The truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth,' has always seemed to me such a fine passage.
But then I have so much that is unbending in my nature."
Dickens and Thackeray, like Lytton, Reade, and Kingsley,
have too much of this trait in their own temperaments
- ↑ Wives and Daughters, I, 394.
- ↑ Ibid., I, 324. Mrs. Gaskell's art is shown in making Cynthia a foil to her mother. Like Dr. Gibson and Molly, she sees through that lady's transparent veiling, but unlike them, she is more frank than polite. Her distressingly literal interpretations of the subtle speeches to which the household is treated, affords a contrast that is lacking, for instance, in the duet of Mrs. Mackenzie and Rosey.
