OUTLINES
born “on the 16th December, 1787. ‘A pleasant house in truth it was,’ Miss Mitford writes. ‘The breakfast-room . . . was a lofty and spacious apartment.’ ” So Miss Mitford was born in the breakfast-room about eight-thirty on a snowy morning between the Doctor’s second and third cups of tea. “Pardon me,” said Mrs. Mitford, turning a little pale, but not omitting to add the right quantity of cream to her husband’s tea, “I feel . . .” That is the way in which Mendacity begins. There is something plausible and even ingenious in her approaches. The touch about the cream, for instance, might be called historical, for it is well known that when Mary won £20,000 in the Irish lottery, the Doctor spent it all upon Wedgwood china, the winning number being stamped upon the soup plates in the middle of an Irish harp, the whole being surmounted by the Mitford arms, and encircled by the motto of Sir John Bertram, one of William the Conqueror’s knights, from whom the Mitfords claimed descent. “Observe,” says Mendacity, “with what an air the Doctor drinks his tea, and how she, poor lady, contrives to curtsey as she leaves the room.” Tea? I inquire, for the Doctor, though a fine figure of a man, is already purple and profuse, and foams like a crimson cock over the frill of his fine laced shirt. “Since the ladies have left the room,” Mendacity begins, and goes on to make up a pack of lies with the sole object of proving that Dr. Mitford kept a mistress in the purlieus of Reading and paid her money on the pretence that he was investing it in a new method of
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