In this way the fame of Sallie Ward was well established at the South when, before she had reached her twentieth year, she married Bigelow Lawrence, of Boston, and entered upon her brief career at the North. The man who thus won her from many Southern rivals was many years her senior, and it was to a woman of her temperament a most unfortunate alliance. He was the son of the Hon. Abbott Lawrence, who had been our minister to England, and was himself a man of wealth and distinction and an exquisite gentleman of the severe Boston school, whose ethics were wholly at variance with that spirit of liberality which was all Sallie Ward had hitherto known. Developed in an atmosphere of almost passionate admiration, love and appreciation had become as necessary to her being as light and air. Transplanted in the very effulgence of her bloom to a frigid temperature of critical and unsympathetic surroundings, all her spontaneous grace congealed into acts of deliberate effrontery. Bewildered by a chill she had never before felt, too young and inexperienced in the ways of the world beyond those of her own genial climate, where she had been a law unto herself, to realize aught of the value of mutual concessions, she struck blindly against the cold conventionality in which she felt herself encaged. It was a strange and almost cruel fate that put her in the bosom of the Lawrence family, and occasioned as much suffering to her Southern heart as to their Northern sensibilities. At a ball given in Boston about the time Mrs. Bloomer was seeking to introduce her reform in woman's dress, and while the subject was being widely discussed. Sallie Ward, then the wife of Bigelow Lawrence, appeared in a costume designed on the Bloomer pattern. Socially conservative Boston was agog, and Lawrence achieved through his wife an unenviable notoriety. Another of her proclivities wrought additional sensation and consequently further havoc in his social status. Notwithstanding the natural beauty of her complexion, it was whispered even in Louisville that she sought with more or less artistic skill to further embellish it. One day when the artifice was unusually apparent, as she passed a group of laboring men, one exclaimed, audibly, "By God, painted!" Nothing daunted and without changing color, the story runs, she said, quietly, "Yes, painted by God," and passed on. Her mother, realizing the unhappy condition of her life with Mr. Lawrence, took her home, and within a year she applied to the Legislature of Kentucky for a divorce, which was granted on the ground of incompatibility of temper. She took her maiden name and lived for several years in retirement.