“It is impossible,” she writes in 1737, “that one of my age and infirmities can live long; and one great happiness there is in death, that one shall never hear more of anything they do in this world.” In another passage, she expresses herself so weary of life, that “she cared not how soon the stroke was given, and wished only that it might be given with as little pain as possible.” Her grace’s amusements became yearly more and more circumscribed. In former years she had occupied her shrewd and masculine mind with purchases of land, which she bought in the firm belief, or at least with the excuse of belief to her own mind, that a “sponge” might do away with all the funded property, and that land would “hold longest.” It appears from her will that she was incessantly making additions to the immense landed property in which she possessed a life interest, and even went to the city herself, when nearly eighty years of age, to bid for Lord Yarmouth’s estate. Her quarrels with Sir Robert Walpole began, as we have seen, upon the subject of “_trust-money_,” and they seem to have hinged upon that same matter even so late as the year 1737.[399] As the darkened day drew to its close, the poor Duchess was fain to be contented to amuse herself by writing in bed, in which shackled position much of her “Vindication” was penned by her.[400] She frequently spoke six hours a day, in giving directions to Hooke. Then she had recourse to a chamber-organ, the eight tunes of which she was obliged to think much better than going to an Italian opera, or an assembly.[401] Society seems to have afforded her little pleasure. Like most disappointed and discontented persons, she became attached to animals, especially to her three dogs, who had those virtues in which human beings, in her estimation, were so greatly deficient. Satiated with the world, the Duchess found, in the numerous visitants to Marlborough-house, few that were capable of friendship. Hers was not a mind to cull sweetness from the flowers which spring up amid the thorns of our destiny. She knew no enjoyment, she declared, equal to that accompanying a strong partiality to a certain individual, with the power of seeing the beloved object frequently; but she now found the generality of the world too disagreeable to feel any partiality strong enough to endear life to the decrepit being that she describes herself to have become.