Ann, when she was little more than twenty, may be said to have entered public life by becoming a maid of honour to Queen Caroline, the wife of George II. From this moment she became one of that group of distinguished women, not blue but brilliant, who adorned England in the eighteenth century by their idiosyncrasies as much as by their abilities. She was courted and beloved by characters so famous as Gay's Duchess of Queensberry and George the Second's Lady Suffolk, and by Mrs. Montagu, who was much more blue than brilliant; for her essay on Shakespeare, so much lauded by her contemporaries, has long been dead and buried. In her dear Mrs. Pitt's conversation, declared this paragon of pedants, she saw Minerva without the formal owl on her helmet. Among men she corresponded with her neighbour, Horace Walpole (who felt for her an affection tempered with alarm), Lord Chesterfield, and Lord Mansfield. 'She had charms enough to kindle a passion in the celebrated Lord Lyttelton,' says Camelford; Dr. Ayscough, a coarse and crafty ecclesiastic, whose acquaintance Pitt and Lyttelton had made at Oxford, and who was a trusted adviser of Frederick, Prince of Wales, sought her in marriage;[44] but there seem no other traces of the tender passion in her life. For the whim, if it indeed were not a joke, which made her ask Lady Suffolk to assist her to secure the hand of Lord Bath (then about seventy, when she herself was forty-six), hardly comes under that description. Ann was, indeed, made rather for admiration than for love. Bolingbroke, who called William 'Sublimity Pitt,' called Ann 'Divinity Pitt.'[45] But she was, one may gather, destitute of beauty,[46] and her vigorous originality of character and conversation inspired, we suspect, more awe than affection. The delightful sprightliness of youth is apt with age or encouragement to sour into a blistering insolence, and Ann had all the sarcastic powers of her brother. For example, Chesterfield calling on her in his later life complained of decay. 'I fear,' he said, 'that I am growing an old woman.' 'I am glad of it,' briskly replied Ann, 'I was afraid you were growing an old man, which you know is a much worse thing.'[47] An attractive, even fascinating, member of society, she was something too formidable for the ordinary man to take to his bosom and his hearth. Reviewing her life, we think that the real and sole object of her love was her brother William, even when her love for the moment vented itself, as love sometimes does, in quarrel. Strife was necessary to the Pitts, and when they waged war with each other it was no battle of roses. The disputes of lovers and relatives, like amicable lawsuits, are apt to become serious affairs, and with this race they were conflicts of the tomahawk. Be that as it may, and whatever the cause, William and Ann adored each other, kept house together, and then quarrelled with prodigious violence and effect. At present we are not near that point.