'I had not seen her [Mary Chaworth] for many years. When an occasion offered, I was upon the point, with her consent, of paying her a visit, when my sister, who has always had more influence over me than anyone else, persuaded me not to do it. "For," said she, "if you go, you will fall in love again, and then there will be a scene; one step will lead to another, _et cela fera un éclat_," etc. I was guided by these reasons, and shortly after I married.... Mrs. Chaworth some time after, being separated from her husband, became insane; but she has since recovered her reason, and is, I believe, reconciled to her husband.' At about the same time Byron told Medwin that, _after_ Mary's separation from her husband, she proposed an interview with him--a suggestion which Byron, by the advice of Mrs. Leigh, declined. He also said to Medwin: 'She [Mary Chaworth] was the _beau-idéal_ of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful; and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection my imagination created in her--I say _created_, for I found her, _like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic_.' It is difficult to see how Byron could have arrived at so unflattering an estimate of a woman whom he had only _once_ seen since her marriage--at a dinner-party, when, as he has told us, he was overcome by shyness and a feeling of awkwardness! But let that pass. Byron wished the world to believe (1) that Mary Chaworth, after the separation from her husband in 1813, proposed a meeting with Byron; (2) that he declined to meet her; (3) that, after his unfortunate marriage, Mary became insane; and (4) that he found her, 'like the rest of her sex, anything but angelic.'