The Duchess proceeds to say, that she hopes that, some time or other, the Queen may find time to reflect upon the unanswerable arguments which the Duchess had laid before her, and that her Majesty would also occasionally listen to the advice of my Lord Marlborough, and then she would never more be troubled with disagreeable letters from her. “The word _command_,” adds the Duchess, “which you use at the beginning of your letter, is very unfitly supposed to come from me. For though I have always writ to you as a friend, and lived with you as such for so many years, with all the truth, and honesty, and zeal for your service that was possible, yet I shall never forget that I am your subject, nor cease to be a faithful one.”[146] This correspondence appears to have had the effect only of widening the breach. It is one peculiarity of our sex, or, at any rate, of the least reflective portion, that the affections once alienated, cannot, by reasoning, by persuasion, even by concession, be restored to their accustomed channel. At Anne’s side there stood a whisperer ever ready to pour into the royal ear the antidote to all the medicine of too wholesome truth, which the Duchess, in her hardihood, dared to administer. It was indeed her boast, that when, without prejudice or passion, she knew the Queen to be wrong, she should think herself wanting in her duty not to tell her Majesty her opinion, “and the rather, because no one else dares to speak out upon so ungrateful a subject.” The poor Queen went on, therefore, much in the same state of indecision and mystery as that in which her life had been passed for years; closeted every night with Mrs. Masham and Harley, and watched at every avenue by the Duchess and her emissaries. When the ministry suspected that the Queen was under the influence of the discarded but dreaded Harley, the Duchess despatched a letter full of remonstrances and reproaches, written with her “usual plainness and zeal.” But finding that by this mode she could make no impression upon her Majesty, the Duchess sought an interview, and begged to know what her crime was that had produced so great an alteration in the Queen. This inquiry drew from Anne a charge of inveteracy and of persecution against “poor Masham,” and a declaration that the Queen would henceforth treat the Duchess as it became her to treat the Duke of Marlborough’s wife, and the groom of the stole; but she forbore specifying any distinct charge against the discarded favourite.