Unfortunately, no details of the meeting are permitted us, but the effect which it had upon the temper even of the mild and prudent Mary, may be inferred from a letter which the Queen wrote to her sister on the ensuing day. After premising that she had something to say which she thought would not be very pleasing to the Princess, the Queen reminded her sister that nobody was ever “suffered to live at court in my Lord Marlborough’s circumstances.” It was therefore incumbent on her Majesty, as she thought, though much against her will, to tell her sister how very unfit it was that Lady Marlborough should stay with the Princess either; “since that,” added the Queen, “gives the husband so just a pretence of being where he ought not.” “Taking everything into consideration,” the Queen, therefore, plainly intimated to her sister, that, since she had allowed Lady Marlborough to accompany her to Kensington on the foregoing night, her Majesty was reduced to the necessity of plainly telling her, that her lady of the bedchamber “must not stay,” and “that she had all the reason imaginable” to look upon Anne’s bringing her as “the strangest thing that ever was done; nor,” added the Queen, “could all my kindness for you, (which is ever ready to turn all you do the best way at any other time,) have hindered me from showing you that at the moment; but I considered your condition, and that made me master myself so far as not to take notice of it then.” “But now,” adds the Queen, “I must tell you, it was very unkind in a sister, would have been very uncivil in an equal, and I need not say I have more to claim, which, though my kindness would make me never extort, yet when I see the use you would make of it, I must tell you I know what is due to me, and expect to have it from you. ’Tis upon that account, I tell you plainly, Lady Marlborough must not continue with you in the circumstances her lord is.” This assumption of the Queen towards her offending sister, Mary softened by kinder terms. “I have all the real kindness imaginable for you,” she added, “and as I ever have, so will always do, my part to live with you as sisters ought;” and neither the King nor she were willing, as she said, to have recourse to harsher means. But, notwithstanding the resolution expressed in the foregoing paragraph,—“the sight of Lady Marlborough,” the Princess proceeds to say, “having changed her style, does naturally change her thoughts.”[229] “She could pass over most things,” and “live with her sister as became her,” but she complained of the want of common civility exhibited by that sister, in not comprehending her wishes, and avoiding the contact with which she had placed her with Lady Marlborough.