In the days here referred to, there were two circumstances to which all maidens looked forward as their probable but not equally desirable lot, namely, marriage and the smallpox. The latter fell on Elizabeth Robinson’s sister Sarah, when the family were resident at Horton, near Hythe. The elder sister was sent to a neighbouring gentleman farmer’s, so called solely because he tilled a few acres of his own. Here, the Iphigenia aroused unwonted sympathies in the breast of the Squire Cymons. She would have nothing to do with furthering the humanising process of those dull and thirsty clods. Their scarlet waistcoats did not impress her like Mr. Lyttelton’s birthday suit at court. One heaving swain, she thought, would make an admirable Polyphemus! He stared at her just as the calves did; but the calves had instinct enough not to say anything to her. They were preferable to the squire, to whom the young girl, with her bright intellect, could not be persuaded “to lend out her liking on land security.” There is a world of meaning in what she wrote on that occasion to her correspondent: “I liked neither him nor myself any better for all the fine things he said.” She was a creature not to be wooed or won by a tippling, foxhunting clown, rich in the possession of dirt. She had finely strung sensibilities, which would not attune themselves to “the loud laugh which speaks the vacant mind.” Mrs. Pendarves, who saw much of her in the town and country mansions of the Duchess of Portland, recognised the above fact. “Fidget,” she wrote, in the year last named, “is a most interesting creature; but I shall not attempt to draw a likeness.... There are some delicate touches that would foil the skill of a much abler artist than I pretend to be.” Just then her fears for her sister were even stronger than her antipathies for her Kentish lovers. In order to satisfy her eagerness to be assured that the sister she loved was out of danger, the latter was allowed to walk veiled into the fields, within speaking distance of the other. Veiled, because she had cruelly suffered, and it was thought better not to shock the elder sister by a sight of the devastation which the foul disease had worked temporarily on the beauty of the younger. Thus, the sisters stood, for a brief time, speaking all that love and hope suggested, and the sound of the convalescent sister’s voice fell like delicious music on the heart of the listener.