ABSTRACT
Late in 1916 Lady Ottoline Morrell wrote to Katherine Mansfield to ask for her account of a recent incident in the Café Royal. Mansfield had been irr itated by what she regarded as the pretentious conversation of some ‘University Blacks’ sharing her table and, encouraged by her companions, she appropriated the copy of Lawrence’s poems they were discussing (Alpers 1982:216-17). In her written response to Morrell’s inquiries she was notably evasive:
Dearest Ottoline What am I to make of this? Of course if the coloured gentleman with the young party with the pink hair was Suhrawadi-then indeed I do know the ‘reverse of the story’.… At any rate, Huxley’s languid letter doesn’t tempt me dreadfully to tell him-to satisfy even his ‘very idlest curiosity’ and ‘merest inquisitiveness’. I am afraid I am not young enough to dance to such small piping. Heavens! his letter makes me feel so old-and inclined to dress up, alone in the studio here-Tie up my head in a turban, make myself fat, don a fur coat with lace frills slightly spotted with tea, and act Lady Mary Wortley Montagu receiving a morning leg fromSwift perhaps.
