Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The person of old Pash has been already parenthetically described. But
quite different from her dismal niece in temperament, she is as jolly an
old widow as ever wore weeds. She was attached somehow to the Court, and
has a multiplicity of stories about the princesses and the old King,
to which Mrs. Berry never fails to call your attention in her grave,
important way. Lady Pash has ridden many a time to the Windsor hounds;
she made her husband become a member of the Four-in-hand Club, and has
numberless stories about Sir Godfrey Webster, Sir John Lade, and the
old heroes of those times. She has lent a rouleau to Dick Sheridan,
and remembers Lord Byron when he was a sulky slim young lad. She says
Charles Fox was the pleasantest fellow she ever met with, and has not
the slightest objection to inform you that one of the princes was very
much in love with her. Yet somehow she is only fifty-two years old, and
I have never been able to understand her calculation. One day or other
before her eye went out, and before those pearly teeth of hers were
stuck to her gums by gold, she must have been a pretty-looking body
enough. Yet, in spite of the latter inconvenience, she eats and
drinks too much every day, and tosses off a glass of maraschino with a
trembling pudgy hand, every finger of which twinkles with a dozen, at
least, of old rings. She has a story about every one of those rings, and
a stupid one too. But there is always something pleasant, I think, in
stupid family stories: they are good-hearted people who tell them.
As for Mrs. Muchit, nothing need be said of her; she is Pash's
companion; she has lived with Lady Pash since the peace. Nor does my
Lady take any more notice of her than of the dust of the earth. She
calls her “poor Muchit,” and considers her a half-witted creature. Mrs.
Berry hates her cordially, and thinks she is a designing toad-eater,
who has formed a conspiracy to rob her of her aunt's fortune. She never
spoke a word to poor Muchit during the whole of dinner, or offered to
help her to anything on the table.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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