Read it through once

This success must have been very gratifying, although any pecuniary advantage it brought was immediately swallowed up in trying to discharge the family’s obligations and to provide for present dire needs. The situation was indeed pitiful, especially for the two women, who were forced to appear before their friends with a smile at a time when their hearts were heavy and desolation and ruin seemed inevitable. A number of letters from Bertram House to Dr. Mitford in London, during the year 1811, give sufficient indication of the suffering they were enduring, and this at a time when Miss Mitford was exercising her mind in the production of a work the failure of which would have been a disaster. Under date January 21, 1811, she wrote: “Mr. Clissold and Thompson Martin came here yesterday, my own darling, and both of them declared that you had allowed Thompson Martin to choose what he would of the pictures, excepting about a dozen which you had named to them; and I really believe they were right, though I did not tell them so. Nothing on earth could be more perfectly civil than they were; and Martin, to my great pleasure and astonishment, but to the great consternation of Clissold, fixed upon the landscape in the corner of the drawing-room, with a great tree and an ass, painted by Corbould, 1803. It had taken his fancy, he said; and, though less valuable than some of those you offered to him, yet, as he did not mean to sell it, he should prefer it to any other. I told him I would write you word what he said, and lauded the gods for the man’s foolishness. I have heard you say fifty times that the piece was of no consequence; and, indeed, as it is by a living artist of no great repute, it is impossible that it should be of much value. Of course you will let him have it; and I wish you would write to inquire how it should be sent.”