In the midst of her unenjoyed wealth, some acts of charity employed her later days. Such persons as had fallen into decay, were never, if they bore good characters, repulsed by her.[404] Imposition of any kind she detected instantly, and exposed it in her own eccentric and fearless manner. Having, on one occasion, sent a costly suit of clothes to be made by a certain fashionable dressmaker, Mrs. Buda, the Duchess, on the dress being completed, missed some yards of the expensive material which she had sent. She discovered and punished the fraud in the following manner. Mrs. Buda had a diamond ring which she valued greatly, and wore frequently when attending the Duchess’s orders. The Duchess pretended to be pleased with this ring, and begged a loan of it as a pattern. Having kept it some days, she sent it to Mrs. Buda’s forewoman, with a message importing that it was to be shown to her, as a token between her grace and Mrs. Buda that a certain piece of cloth should be returned instead. The woman, knowing the ring, sent the Duchess the remnant of cloth which had been fraudulently kept by Mrs. Buda; upon which the Duchess sent for Mrs. Buda, and putting the ring into her hand, said, that since she had now recovered the cloth which had been stolen from her, Mrs. Buda should regain the ring which the Duchess had kept.[405] As she grew older, the firm grasp with which she had ever endeavoured to hold her temporal possessions became more tenacious. She seems to have tired out the Treasury with frequent complaints respecting disputed points which concerned her office of Ranger of Windsor Park, and to have been wonderfully grateful to the powers that had the ascendant for civility to which for years she had been unaccustomed. “You have drawn this trouble upon yourself,” she writes to Mr. Scrope, secretary to Mr. Pelham, “by a goodness I have not found in any body these many years.”[406] And with corresponding humility she begs him to excuse the length of her letter, for, having none of her servants in the way, she found herself obliged to make use of a female secretary, who was not very correct; “but the hand,” adds the poor old Duchess, “is plain enough to be read easily; the worst of it is, that it looks so frightfully long, that a man of business will turn it before he reads it.”[407] Such was the subdued tone in which the Duchess, a year before her death, addressed the official whom in former days she would have commanded.