ainy day, one
stretched out one's hands to be warmed. She guarded herself against
the charge of being amiable. "It would be horrid to be amiable,"
she used to say, and, indeed, there was always a touch of sharpness
about her. She was amused once because I told her she was like an
acidulated drop, half sweet and half sour. "Oh! any stupid woman
can be sweet," she said, "it's often another name for imbecile."

She had curious little prejudices and antipathies. I never fathomed
the reason of her fantastic horror of the feasts of the Church,
particularly of Christmas. She always became curiously agitated as
the month of December waned. In her notes she inveighed, in quaint
alarm, against the impending "Christmas pains and penalties." I
think she disliked the disturbance of social arrangements which
these festivals entailed. But there was more than that. She was
certainly a little superstitious, in a mocking, eighteenth-century
sort of way, as Madame du Deffand might have been. She constantly
said, and still more frequently wrote, "D.V." after any project,
even of the most frivolous kind. The idea was that one should be
polite all round, in case of any contingency. When she was in the
Riviera, she was much interested to hear that the Prince of Monaco
had built and endowed a handsome church at Monte Carlo. "Very
clever of him," she said, "for you never can tell."

Lady Dorothy's entire absence of affectation was eminently
attractive. She would be mistress of herself, though China fell.
Her strange little activities, her needlework, her paperwork, her
collections, were the wonder of everybody, but she did not require
approval; she adopted them, in the light of day, for her own
amusement. She never pushed her peculiarities on the notice of
visitors, but, at the same time, if discovered in the act of some
incredible industry, she went on with it calmly. When she was in
Heidelberg in 1892 and successive years, what interested her was
the oddity of the students' life; she expatiated to me on their
beer and their sabre-cuts. Whenever I went abroad of late years, I
was exhorted to send her picture post-cards from out-of-the-way
places, and "Remember that I like vulgar ones best," she added
imperturbably. The story is perhaps known to you of how, in a
circ