It was this self-will, this colossal egotism that led her to spend so much of her time in conversation--if those could be called conversations in which one of the talkers insisted upon a monopoly of attention. It would be more accurate to describe them as monologues, with occasional interpolations of assent on the part of the listener. We have no wish to underrate their charm, though, from the reports transmitted to posterity, they would hardly seem to have deserved the very warm eulogy pronounced by the physician, who says,[25] "Her conversations lasted eight and ten hours at a time, without moving from her seat: so that, although highly entertained, instructed, or astonished at her versatile powers, as the listeners might be, it was impossible not to feel the weariness of so long a sitting. Everybody," he adds, "who visited Lady Hester Stanhope in her retirement will bear witness to her unexampled colloquial powers; to her profound knowledge of character; to her inexhaustible fund of anecdotes; to her talents for mimicry; to her modes of narration, as various as the subjects she talked about; to the lofty inspiration and sublimity of her language, when the subject required it; and to her pathos and feeling, whenever she wished to excite the emotions of her hearers. There was no secret of the human heart, however studiously concealed, that she could not discover; no workings in the listener's mind that she would not penetrate; no intrigue, from the low cunning of vulgar intrigue to the vast combinations of politics, that she would not unravel; no labyrinth, however tortuous, that she would not thread. It was this comprehensive and searching faculty, this intuitive penetration, which made her so formidable; for under imaginary names, when she wished to show a person that his character and course of life were unmasked to her view, she would, in his very presence, paint him such a picture of himself, in drawing the portrait of another, that you might see the individual writhing on his chair, unable to conceal the effect the words had on his conscience. Everybody who heard her for an hour or two retired humbled from her presence, for her language was always directed to bring mankind to their level, to pull down pride and conceit, to strip off the garb of affectation, and to shame vice, immorality, irreligion, and hypocrisy."