Certainly the simple life appealed to Lady Mary, but much as she liked Geneva the cost of living irked her. "Everything is as dear as it is at London," she complained to her husband in November, 1741. "'Tis true, as all equipages are forbidden, that expense is entirely retrenched.... The way of living is absolutely the reverse of that in Italy. Here is no show, and a great deal of eating; there is all the magnificence imaginable, and no dinners but on particular occasions; yet the difference of the prices renders the total expense very near equal.... The people here are very well to be liked, and this little republic has an air of the simplicity of old Rome in its earliest age. The magistrates toil with their own hands, and their wives literally dress their dinners against their return from their little senate. Yet without dress and equipage 'tis as dear living here for a stranger, as in places where one is obliged to both, from the price of all sort of provision, which they are forced to buy from their neighbours, having almost no land of their own." How much more agreeable, from Lady Mary's point of view, was Chambery: "Here is the most profound peace and unbounded plenty that is to be found in any corner of the universe; but not one rag of money. For my part, I think it amounts to the same thing, whether one is obliged to give several pence for bread, or can have a great deal of bread for a penny, since the Savoyard nobility here keep as good tables, without money, as those in London, who spend in a week what would be here a considerable yearly revenue. Wine, which is equal to the best burgundy, is sold for a penny a quart, and I have a cook for very small wages, that is capable of rivalling Chloé." "My girl gives me great prospect of satisfaction, but my young rogue of a son is the most ungovernable little rake that ever played truant," Lady Mary wrote to Lady Mar in July, 1727, when the boy was fourteen and the girl nine years old. It has already been mentioned that young Edward, who was placed at Westminster School at the early age of five, ran away. In fact, he ran away more than once. "My blessed offspring has already made a great noise in the world," his mother told Lady Mar in July, 1726. "That young rake, my son, took to his heels t'other day and transported his person to Oxford; being in his own opinion thoroughly qualified for the University. After a good deal of search we found and reduced him, much against his will, to the humble condition of a schoolboy. It happens very luckily that the sobriety and discretion is of my daughter's side; I am sorry the ugliness is so too, for my son grows extremely handsome." The lad was incorrigible. In the following year he disappeared for some months, to be found selling fish at Blackwall.