This little romance having come to a sad conclusion, Mrs. Montagu was soon afterward in town, running, as she said, “from house to house, getting the cold scraps of visiting conversation, served up with the indelicacy and indifference of an ordinary, at which no power of the mind does the honours; the particular taste of each guest is not consulted, the solid part of the entertainment is too gross for a delicate taste, and the lighter fare insipid. Indeed, I do not love fine ladies, but I am to dine with ... to-morrow, notwithstanding.” Again, in November, 1754, she writes from Hill Street, the day after her arrival: “In my town character, I made fifteen visits last night. I should not so suddenly have assumed my great hoop, if I had not desired to pay the earliest respects to Lady Hester Pitt, who is something far beyond a merely fine lady.” Mrs. Montagu did not seek for friends exclusively among the great. With her and with Lyttelton, intellect was the chief attraction. They both received into their friendship the refugee Bower, who made so much noise in his day. Mrs. Montagu and Lyttelton refused to abandon him when he was assailed by his enemies. When she was told, in a letter from a Roman Catholic, that Bower, the ex-Jesuit whom she had received in her house, was a knave, that his wife was a hussy, and that Mrs. Montagu herself was an obstinate idoliser and a perverse baby for believing in them, she continued her trust, despised report, and asked for facts. In 1755, Mrs. Montagu affected to detect the first sign of her superannuation in her sudden resolution not to go to Lady Townshend’s ball, though a new pink silver negligée lay ready for the donning. Once, she said, her dear friend, Vanity, could lure her over the Alps or the ocean to a ball like Lady Townshend’s. The day was past since she would have gone eight miles, in winter, to dance to a fiddle, and would have squalled with joy at being upset on her way home. She and Vanity, she thought, had now parted. “I really believe she has left me as lovers do their mistresses, because I was too fond, denied her nothing, and was too compliant to give a piquancy to our commerce.” She was as “sharp” in judging others as herself. Of Lady Essex (the daughter of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who married the Earl of Essex in 1754, and died in 1759), Mrs. Montagu, in the intervening year, 1756, says: “Lady Essex coquettes extremely with her own husband, which is very lawful.... She wants to have the _bon ton_, and we know the _bon ton_ of 1756 is _un peu equivoque_.”