While the social tragedy was affecting his private life, Lawrence was making great headway in his profession and out of it. In society he was an established favourite; he had a handsome face, a fluent and honeyed tongue, he wrote agreeable verses, and made facile sketches, which he would give freely to his friends and acquaintances. His most intimate associates were Smirke, the architect of the British Museum, Farrington and Fuseli the artists, John Kemble the actor, and Mrs. Siddons, whom he painted as Aspasia as well as Zara, though he never approached the beauty of the Gainsborough Siddons in our national collection. Some of his paintings went to engravers, who paid big prices for them; and though after moving from Bond Street to Greek Street he settled finally at 65 Russell Square, he never entertained on such a scale as his position would have justified. In fact he seldom or never gave a dinner party, excusing himself on the ground that he had neither wife nor mistress to superintend one. His prices rose steadily; he took half his fee in advance, but was always in debt and difficulty, and frequently forced to borrow at a high rate of interest. A devoted and conscientious worker, he always stood to his canvas, and seldom spoke to his sitter. At a first sitting he would draw the sitter’s head, at the second he would start painting. He told friends that on one occasion he worked for thirty-seven hours consecutively, a marvellous feat for a man who never sat down to paint. In the year 1801 Lawrence passed through a very critical time. The Princess of Wales sat to him at Montague House, Blackheath; he stayed in the house while at work on the portrait, spoke and wrote in rather indiscreet fashion, guiltless of everything save enthusiasm, and provoked a scandal of the first magnitude that alienated royal favour. The scandal grew and spread and was partly the subject of the commission of inquiry that sat several years later, and whose labours were known as “The Delicate Investigation.” Lawrence was not even referred to in the report issued by the commissioners, but he made a difficult position worse by going out of the way publicly to declare his own and the Princess’s innocence. For some time after the scandal was broached, the lady visitors to the studio in Russell Square were few and far between, and Lawrence was never as happy with men as with women. The genius of his brush was essentially feminine.