“‘Do you know,’ said Lady Waterford to-day, ‘that Jane Ellice has got one convert to her teetotalism; and do you know who that is? That is me. I have not touched wine for six months. I think it is good for the household. They used to say, if they saw me as strong as a horse, “Ah! there, look at my lady; it is true she is as strong as a horse, but then she always has all the wine she wants,” but now they say, “My lady has no wine at all, and yet you see she is as strong as a horse.”’
“Mrs. Fairholme spoke of Curramore, and how she disliked somebody who pretended that the beautiful terraces there were designed by herself and not by Lady Waterford. With her generous simplicity, Lady Waterford said, ‘Oh, I don’t see why you should do that at all: I think it was rather a compliment, for it showed she admired the terraces, or she would not have wished it to be supposed that they were due to her.’
“Miss Fairholme was tired. ‘Now do rest,’ Lady Waterford said—‘there is the sofa close by you—qui vous tend les bras;’ and then she talked to us of old Lady Balcarres, ‘the mother of Grandmama Hardwicke’—the severe mother, who, when one of her little boys disobeyed her, ordered the servants to fling him into the pond in front of the house. He managed to scramble out again; she bade them throw him in a second time, and a second time he got out, and, when she ordered it a third time, he exclaimed in his broad Scotch accent, ‘Woman, wad ye droun yer ain son?’
“In the afternoon we were to have gone to the Heathpool Lynn, but did go to Langley Ford by mistake—a very long walk, after leaving the carriage, up a bleak moorland valley. I walked chiefly with Miss Lindsay. She talked of the extraordinary discovery of the well at Castle Hedingham by ‘a wise woman’ by the power of the hazel wand—the hazel twig bending on the right spot, not only upon the ground itself, but upon the representation of it on the map. She talked of the blind and dumb Sabbatarianism of the Presbyterians. She asked a respectable poor woman how she liked the new preacher. ‘Wad I presume?’ she replied.”
“Oct. 18.—This morning Lady Waterford wished that the Misses Lindsay had been dressed alike even in details. ‘It is a law of nature, I think, that sisters should dress alike. A covey of partridges are all alike; they do not want to have feathers of different colours; and why not children of the same family?’
“We had a charming walk to Etal in the afternoon—lovely soft lights on the distant hills, and brilliant reflections of the autumnal foliage in the Till. We went to the castle, and then down the glen by St. Mary’s Oratory and Well. Lady W. talked of the beauty of the sedges and of their great variety—of the difficult law, or rather no law, of reflections. Then of marriages—of the number of widows being so much greater than that of widowers, and of the change which the loss of a husband made in all the smallest details of life: of the supreme desolation of Lady Charlotte Denison, ‘after a honeymoon of forty-three years.’ Old Lady Tankerville was of another nature. She was urging a widowed friend to do something. ‘Oh, but my cap, my cap!’ groaned the friend. ‘Comment,’ exclaimed Lady Tankerville, ‘c’est le vrai bonnet de la liberté.’
“Speaking of complexions—‘My grandmother used to say,’ said Mrs. Fairholme, ‘that beauty “went out” with open carriages. “Why, you are just like men, my dear,” she said, “with your brown necks, and your rough skins, and your red noses. In our days it was different; young ladies never walked, ate nothing but white meat, and never washed their faces. They covered their faces with powder, and then put cold cream on, and wiped it off with a flannel: that was the way to have a good complexion.’”