When I complimented her on her wonderful knowledge of
English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
she answered, "In my young days we studied the 'Belles Lettres';
modern women only study 'Belle's Letters,'" an allusion to a
weekly summary of social events then appearing in the World under
that title, a chronicle voraciously devoured by thousands of
women. When the early prejudice against railways was alluded to by
some one who recalled the storms of protest that the conveyance of
the Duke of Sussex's body by train to Windsor for burial provoked,
as being derogatory to the dignity of a Royal Duke, it was Lady
Cork who rapped out, "I presume in those days, a novel apposition
of the quick and the dead." A certain peer was remarkable alike
for his extreme parsimony and his unusual plainness of face. His
wife shared these characteristics, both facial and temperamental,
to the full, and yet this childless, unprepossessing and eminently
economical couple were absolutely wrapped up in one another; after
his death she only lingered on for three months.
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