Twenty years of gay "outing" she lives, between London and its suburbs; happy, yet not happy; courted and not courted. She writes to her sister Lady Mar[14] in these times: "Don't you remember how miserable we were in the little parlor at Thoresby? We then thought marrying would put us at once in possession of all we wanted.... One should pluck up a spirit and live upon cordials, when one can have no other nourishment. These are my present endeavors, and I run about though I have five thousand pins and needles running into my heart. I try to console myself with a small damsel [her daughter, afterward Lady Bute] who is at present everything I like; but, alas, she is yet in a white frock. At fourteen she may run away with the butler." And when this maiden in white had married (better than the mother dared hope), and her son, a vagrant, had gone out into the world and the night, Lady Mary--believing in "cordials"--gathered her robes about her, and took her fading face into the blaze of the Continental cities. Her reputation for wit, and daring, and beauty has gone before her, and she writes piquantly and with great complacency of the attentions and {28} greetings that meet her in Venice, Florence, and Milan. The appetite for this life grows with feeding; so it becomes virtually a separation from her husband, though cool, business-like letters regularly pass between them. Her son, though grown up into an "accomplished" man, is a scoundrel--drifting about Europe; and when they encounter the mother insists that he shall drop his name, and deny relationship. Twenty-two years she lives in that Continental exile, writing all the while letters to her daughter, which she loved to compare with the letters of Madame de Sévigné. They are witty and sparkling and have passed into a certain place in English literature, but they are not Sévigné letters. Toward the last of her residence abroad she bought an old ruinous palace in Lombardy, not far from Lago di Guarda, equipped three or four of its rooms, and with a little bevy of servants, lived in retirement--busied with reading, with her ducks, her pigeons, and her garden. She writes her daughter: "The active scenes are over at my age; I indulge, with all the art I can, my taste for reading. If I _could_ confine it to {29} valuable books; they are almost as scarce as valuable men.... As I approach a second childhood I endeavor to enter into the pleasures of it.... I am reading an idle tale, not expecting wit or truth in it; and am very glad it is not metaphysics to puzzle my judgment, or history to mislead my opinion." She is well past sixty and has lost all her old graces when she falls into this misanthropic spirit; has grown strangely neglectful of her person too; she says that for eleven years now she has not looked in a mirror.[15]