Time, however, overtook her, as he overtakes other people, and beat her in the race. Latterly she went out little in search of society, either because invitations came sparsely in, or that the fatigue was too great for her, or that she grudged the fly-hire. But she had weekly receptions in her own little drawing-room, and moved heaven and earth, and a variety of penny-post men, to get them attended. A few old Whigs, including the Marquess of Lansdowne and good-natured Lord Carlisle, when he happened to be in town, looked in occasionally at her soirées. Now and then a Tory man of genius—Sir E. B. Lytton, for example—would make his appearance; and it has even been whispered, though we doubt the truth of the story, that a learned divine, sometimes two, might occasionally be seen in the throng. But the bulk of her guests consisted of fashionables of a second or third order, with a few small celebrities, literary, musical, and artistic. The little woman was very great on these occasions. She dispensed her weak tea and weaker conversation with equal fluency; she flattered and received flattery to any conceivable amount. Every man his own trumpeter, and every woman too, was with her an article of religious belief; and she did what religious professors are suspected of not always doing—she carried her faith into practice. A judicious application of rouge to the cheeks, the frocks and furbelows of a girl, a mincing gait, and a perpetual smile, set her forth to the best advantage. At eighty-three years of age she was still a butterfly; and if she could not flit, she floundered from flower to flower.