Read it through once

“I really think,” she wrote, “that my dearly-beloved mother had better have the jack-asses than the horses. The former will at least have the recommendation of singularity, which the other has not; as I am convinced that more than half the smart carriages in the neighbourhood of Reading are drawn by the horses which work in the team,” a reply, the whimsicality of which is only equalled by its pertness, when we remember that the smart carriages alluded to must have been the conveyances of the county gentry whose estates in the neighbourhood and whose lineage were not altogether insignificant. At the same time it is a reply—and for this reason is quoted—which marks the outcropping of that characteristic which Miss Mitford possessed and to which she often gave expression—an abiding distaste for anything approaching snobbery or self-assertion.