I’ve got to go off to Yorkshire in a few days to attend ——’s patient....
My coachman got drunk last week, and I turned him off at an hour’s notice, and had to see to the stable myself for a day or two!—My whole household has been upside down, and in the midst of it my dear old Turk died last week, but quite quietly and without pain. I have a new page, and a new cook, and a new groom,[[139]] and am going to have a new housemaid,—don’t you pity me?—Still I say ‘Life is good,’—Can you have better testimony?”
Her advice on occasion could be fairly drastic:
“Yes,—I know about Miss W. Why do you let her stay 1½ hours with you? At the end of five minutes I should take out my watch and say,—‘Now I have just ten minutes more for you,—is there anything you want to say?’ That’s the way to treat those sort of folks. I am not ‘too good for this world.’”
Here is a rather amusing answer to a question from Dr. Pechey,—“Why[“Why] do you recommend Vermouth?”
“Dear Edie,
I sent off my two cards to you too hurriedly to answer about ‘Vermouth’!—but now let me say at my leisure that I never heard anything more beautifully illustrative of the way stories are ‘evolved.’
The one and only occasion when I made acquaintance with Vermouth was when one day, during a hurried call at Mrs. Nichol’s, the dear old lady in Mr. F.’s presence, offered me some Vermouth as something new she had got, and insisted on my tasting it,—which I did, and said I thought it ‘very nice,’ as in duty bound! Neither before nor afterwards have I either seen or heard of it! It really is nice, I think,—in the orange bitters line,—but further I know nothing about it, and certainly never recommended it in my life—nor expect to.
My professional life is, I find, largely a crusade against tea and alcohol, so certainly I am not likely to preach up new liqueurs—if this is one.”
To Dr. Sewall she writes,