Something Dangerous [antikvár]

CHAPTER IVenetia Lytton was extremely fond of telling people that the whole country had gone into mourning on the day of her birth.This announcement, although historically accurate, and guaranteed to win her attention in whatever company she chose to make it, gave nonetheless a slightly erroneous picture; it was left to her twin sister Adele, naturally incUned to a shghtly more prosaic view of life, to explain that their birth had coincided almost to the hour with the death of King Edward the Seventh.'Oh - all right,' Venetia would say crossly, 'but it was still a terrifically dark day, Mummy said the nurses were sobbing harder and harder each time they brought in another bouquet of flowers and when Daddy arrived, the doctor actually greeted him wearing a black tie. So of course he thought something terrible had happened.'Whereupon someone, usually one of the twins' two brothers if they were present, would inevitably remark that indeed it had, and that she and Adele had been launched upon an unsuspecting world, then Venetia would pretend to sulk, Adele would smile serenely, and someone else (usually another young woman in search of a little attention for herself) would endeavour to change the subject.It was not easy to divert attention from the Lytton twins; not only were they extremely pretty (beautiful, some even claimed) and very amusing, but they really were quite extraordinarily alike. It was said that the famous Morgan twins, Thelma and Gloria (better known as Lady Fumess and Mrs Reginald Vanderbilt respectively), could not be told apart unless you were close enough to detect a small scar under Thelma's chin, the result of a roller-skating accident when she was a child; the Lytton twins offered no such helpful clue. Venetia did have a small mole on her right buttock, and the twins had also observed, from the first moment such a thing was observable, that Adele's nipples were darker and slighdy larger than her sister's, but since these were facts extremely hard to verify, and certainly of no use at all in normal social situations, most people had no idea much of the time which of the twins they were talking to, sitting next to, dancing with. Even their closer circle found it virtually impossible to tell.It was a state of affairs that the twins still found amusing to encourage.