This behaviour needed now no further explanation. The Duchess perceived too late that she was supplanted; and she was resolved that Mrs. Masham should quickly know that her injured benefactress was undeceived. She wrote, therefore, with her usual promptitude and sincerity, the following candid, but at the same time moderate letter to her rival. Godolphin, whom she consulted upon all occasions, probably pruned it into the following careful form. “Since the conversation I had with you at your lodgings, several things have happened to confirm me in what I was hard to believe—that you have made me returns very unsuitable to what I might have expected. I always speak my mind so plainly, that I should have told you so myself, if I had had the opportunity which I wished for; but being now so near parting, think this way of letting you know it, is like to be the least uneasy to you, as well as to “Your humble servant, “S. MARLBOROUGH.” To this letter no immediate reply was returned; for, doubtless, Mrs. Masham had, on the other hand, her advisers. The Duchess in vain waited all the day at Windsor, after sending her letter, in expectation of a reply. Mrs. Masham was, however, obliged to consult with her great director, before she could frame an answer on so “nice a matter.” It was, indeed, no easy point to explain, that a poor relation, only a dresser, as the Duchess remarked, and she a groom of the stole, should conceal from a relation to whom she owed everything, that affair which most concerned her; whilst the Queen, who, for thirty years had never disguised one circumstance from her faithful Freeman, should be led into the plot. The primary origin of her disgrace she imputed, when time had cooled her resentments, to her efforts to establish the Whigs in the Queen’s favour. The immediate source of the quarrel was the successful endeavour of Mrs. Hill to supplant the cousin, to whom she professed to owe great obligations. For, as the Duchess affirms, even when every word she spoke had become distasteful to Anne, and when every step she took was canvassed in the Queen’s closet, still the Queen declared she was not in the least altered, whilst Mrs. Masham professed the deepest gratitude.[102]