Free Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford Page B

queens, archduchesses and grand dukes had scattered Dearest and Darling Sonia and Loving all over their trains and uniform trousers.
    In the middle of all this silver and satin and silk, Lady Montdore cut rather a comic figure drinking strong tea in bed among masses of lace pillows, her coarse grey hair frizzed out, and wearing what appeared to be a man’s striped flannel pyjama top under a feathered wrap. The striped pyjamas were not the only incongruous touch in the room. On her lacy dressing table with its big, solid silver looking-glass and among her silver and enamel brushes, bottles and boxes with their diamond cypher, were a black Mason Pearson hair brush and a pot of Pond’s cold cream, while dumped down in the middle of the royalties were a rusty nail file, a broken comb and a bit of cotton wool. While we were talking, Lady Montdore’s maid came in and with much clicking of her tongue was about to remove all these objects when Lady Montdore told her to leave them, as she had not finished.
    Her quilt was covered with newspapers and opened letters and she held the
Times
Circular, probably the only part of it she ever looked at, since news, she used to say, can always be gleaned, and far more accurately too, from those who make it. I think she felt it comfortable, rather like reading prayers, to begin the day with their Majesties having attended Divine Service at Sandringham and Mabell Countess of Airlie having succeeded the Lady Elizabeth Motion as Lady in Waiting to the Queen. It indicated that the globe was still revolving in accordance with the laws of nature.
    “Good morning, Fanny dear,” she said. “This will interest you, I suppose.”
    She handed me the
Times
and I saw that Linda’s engagement to Anthony Kroesig was announced at last.
    “Poor Alconleighs,” she went on, in tones of deep satisfaction. “No wonder they don’t like it! What a silly girl! Well, she always has been, in my opinion. No place. Rich, of course, but banker’smoney; it comes and it goes and however much of it there may be it’s not like marrying all this.”
    “All this” was a favourite expression of Lady Montdore’s. It did not mean all this beauty, this strange and fairy-like house set in the middle of four great avenues rushing up four artificial slopes, the ordered spaces of trees and grass and sky seen from its windows, or the aesthetic joy given by the treasures it contained, for she was not gifted with the sense of beauty and if she admired anything at all it was rather what might be described as stockbroker’s picturesque. She had made herself a little garden round a Cotswold well-head, rustic, with heather and rambler roses, and to this she would often retire in order to sketch the sunset. “So beautiful it makes me want to cry.” She had all the sentimentality of her generation, and this sentimentality, growing like a green moss over her spirit, helped to conceal its texture of stone, if not from others, at any rate from herself. She was convinced that she was a woman of profound sensibility.
    “All this,” on her lips, meant position allied to such solid assets as acres, coal mines, real estate, jewels, silver, pictures, incunables, and other possessions of the sort. Lord Montdore owned an almost incredible number of such things, fortunately.
    “Not that I ever expected poor little Linda to make a suitable marriage,” she went on. “Sadie is a wonderful woman, of course, and I’m devoted to her, but I’m afraid she hasn’t the very smallest idea how to bring up girls.”
    Nevertheless, no sooner did Aunt Sadie’s girls show their noses outside the schoolroom than they were snapped up and married, albeit unsuitably, and perhaps this fact was rankling a little with Lady Montdore whose mind appeared to be so much on the subject.
    The relations between Hampton and Alconleigh were as follows: Lady Montdore had an irritated fondness for Aunt Sadie, whom she half admired for an integrity which she could not