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 thinks of herself, and is "really the most forgiving person in the world, in forgiving slights." She is overcome by the spring weather,—

"Primavera, I think the Italians call it. * * * It makes me sigh perpetually; but then I am so sensitive. Dear Lady Cumnor used to say I was like a thermometer."

But it is in her association with Lady Harriet that her sincerity and candor shine forth. Apprised, on one occasion, of the intention of that personage—an aristocrat in character as well as social station—to honor her with a morning call, she dispatches to a neighbor her stepdaughter Molly, of whose friendship with Lady Harriet she is jealous, and keeps at home her own daughter Cynthia, to prepare the especially delicious luncheon to which the guest is to be invited as an impromptu bit of pot-luck. During this visit Lady Harriet brings up the question of white lies, confessing to an occasional indulgence, and asking her hostess if she never yielded to the temptation. She is answered:

"I should have been miserable if I ever had. I should have died of self-reproach. 'The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' has always seemed to me such a fine passage. But then I have so much that is unbending in my nature."

Dickens and Thackeray, like Lytton, Reade, and Kingsley, have too much of this trait in their own temperaments