Upon one occasion she scandalized the court-usher soul of Horace Walpole by masquerading at St. James's in a costume of red flannel. As a rule, she carried her innovations triumphantly; but now and then she was forced to yield to a will more imperative than her own. Once the fantastic old King of Rath tore off her favourite white apron in the Pump Room, flinging it contemptuously among the 'waiting gentlewomen' in the hinder benches. 'None but abigails wore white aprons,' he declared; and the grande dame _de par la monde_ made a virtue of necessity, and submitted. In her own entertainments, however, she seems to have been as despotic as Nash, insisting that people should come early and leave early, and declining to provide the profuse refreshments then expected. High-spirited and whimsical no doubt she was; but the stories told of her are probably exaggerated. Those who praise her, praise her unreservedly. Her character was unblemished. She was truthful; she was honest; she was not a flatterer. And she was certainly fearless, for she dared, even in the rudimentary epoch of the two-pronged fork, to rally the terrible Dean of St. Patrick's for that deplorable habit--so justly deprecated by the Historian of Snobs--of putting his knife in his mouth. When she saw any one 'administer the cold steel,' as Thackeray calls it, she would shriek out in affected terror lest they should do themselves a mischief. She seems, although they never really met after her girlhood, to have wholly subjugated Swift, whose final tone to her comes perilously close to that fulsome adulation which, in others, stirred his fiercest scorn. 'I will excuse your blots upon paper,' he says, writing to her after Gay death, 'because they are the only blots you ever did, or ever will make, in the whole course of your life.' Further on he refers 'to the universal, almost idolatrous esteem you have forced from every person in two kingdoms, who have the least regard for virtue.' It is her peculiar art, he tells her again, to bribe 'all wise and good men to be her flatterers.' Swift was no paragon; but the praise of Swift outweighs the sneers of Walpole.